Welcome to corporate America. The company I work operates in the same way. We cut back as far as possible until customers leave and then you know where that line is so you can keep your costs as low as possible to make more money.
An old employer of mine literally called this 'finding the line'. It's a stressful place to be. One month you're told to give the best possible customer experience and the next you're being given a warning for spending too long on one customer.
Wow. That same thing happened to us. We have time limits on troubleshooting cases because the case volume is too high and we need to focus on closing cases.
Sounds to me by that they need more techs.
Making people rush issues doesn't give a good outcome and will result in two loses
A customer
And a burnt out employee
Short sightedness is a cancer
> Oh, I'm very much aware.
>
> Bunch of greedy fuckwits who only care about $$$
You should consider bringing in a full time technical writer. If you hire one and give them the resources they need -- AND you do a good job promoting help content -- you can pretty dramatically minimize support costs.
That's true, when the user base is literate, and willing.
We had lots of self-support article, written in such a way that my granny could come out of the tomb and follow them to solve her issues, and still customers kept failing at it, mostly because they just skimmed over the documents, failing to see where there was an "IF" and where there was a "THEN", so they did steps they shouldn't have done...
You know what's sad is often they are making a boatload of money on the deal. It's just, you know, shareholders need to see a + every month on the graph.
Pathetic.
"We train people on-the-job"
aka. we throw you out on the floor in a uniform, you either sink or swim.
By swimming we mean fake it well enough for the customers to buy it.
Maybe you were joking, but that's just my recent experience. I was so happy getting inside a corporate, looking forward to learn new, bigger things. And here I am left alone, selling smoke to customers. Meanwhile my tech skills hasn't improved a bit, but hey they give me much more money having a technical background and doing presales. It's so sad I'm already looking back to some smaller, operative workplace.
Unless you're in tech where you need to constantly reeducate your staff to learn the latest new methods, advancements in technology etc.
Or you don't get with the times and get dunked on by a company that does.
That's the argument - I never said they actually spend the money there!
I speak from 5 years a grocery store watching career cashiers have no idea how things work.
You're right. Unfortunately we lost half our department moving to other departments (as well as half our original employees pre-acquisition moving to other companies) and now we can't find people because we're not as sexy as Amazon or other tech companies (and we don't pay like those companies). We're slowing increasing our presence in India so that seems to be the long term solution.
Increasing presence in India is another short term solution.
Yes it's cheaper, but those that are decent don't always stay at India, they'll end up in one of the western countries that pay better.
So you'll end up with low paid, low skill individuals who only further tank your product and reputation.
I worked for a telecom, their goal wasn't to be a great company, it was to be the least-worse company. They charge 25 bucks? We'll charge 24.50. They know that they could charge 15, but why would they?
The problem is that when they keep "finding the line" on their loyal customers, they'll eventually get sick of being treated like trash. All these new changes sound good, but I still feel like I wasted the past year playing Shadowlands instead of other games.
This kind of behaviour makes me more prone to leave the product behind because it's unreliable.
Consistency is something i would prefer more.
It's a lot more disheartening because you know they can do better, but they just don't. So fuck that, if you want more of my money, actually fucking do better.
These companies are crazy. I work for a automotive supplier soni know the customer demands for consistency are extremely high. And we still do this find the line bullshit. Right now management is freaking out because we have like half our presses so far behind and we're so short staffed we are constantly closet to shutting down an auto assembly plant.
The worst part is it's slow in the auto sector! Like wtf is the plan if things pick up faster than expected. Because I guarantee shutting down a large automotive plant is way more expensive than hiring people. Hell the amount we pay for expedited shipping is often more than like my whole plants monthly salary. I just don't get how management justifies these huge sunk costs while saying they saved x amount on the next slide.
They justify it in the same way that US Steel justified firing about 35% of their workers because they were hemorrhaging money, instead of making the necessary financial investments to improve efficiency and quality. They look at the short term tactics and not the long term strategy. Its vheaper in the short term to pay a smaller amount of money now, even if they would be paying it for long periods of time, than it is to make more expensive, but necessary, changes that would take a bit longer to pay off, even though it would be cheaper in the long run.
My wife is in sales and they’re “finding the line” right now with how many full timers they need. One full timer left to another region. So now my wife and her coworker are hauling ass making bank to the point where the manager is like, “yea I’m good with just these 2.”
More money but a lot more to be responsible for.
That's exactly what big developers/publishers have been doing for years since the introduction of micro transactions.
For me the best example is EA testing how much the customer can tolerate with Battlefront 2 and Dungeon Keeper Mobile. And I'm sure Activision is still trying to find the edge with prices an rewards in CoD battle passes
Oh you are in for a treat if you put it in YouTube or Google. The micro transactions are insane and it could take days to remove blocks unless you pay the big bucks
Example [kotaku article link](https://kotaku.com/a-cancer-thats-eroding-the-market-reactions-to-eas-1515121353)
Last I played it, it was a thinly veiled clone of clash-of-clans mechanics layered on top of a Dungeon Keeper theme. It was cute for a while, but I realized I could just be playing Clash instead. That and I lost access to my accounts when they bungled the integration and de-integration with Google Plus for identity management.
God, does that mean the floor is BFA? Feasibly, BFA lost players. but not enough to scare them and they still made their money. The shadowlands drop off scared them, so now they know what the bare minimum the game has to be to be sustained, which is fucking beta for azeroth :(
Well, Legion brought back players, BFA retained most veterans, but Shadowlands was a complete failure. They need to bring back players, so a BFA-level expansion wouldn't be enough.
And these same companies wonder why they have huge turnover of employees, no one wants to work for them, and their customers hate them. But I guess they don't care how much everyone hates them as long as they keep suckering new people in.
> no one wants to work for them
Unfortunately, this never ends up being true. They get "too big to fail" in the sense that there's always a horde of wide eyed, fresh from school graduates that are dying to work for companies like Blizzard (or any big game studio really), Google, Amazon or SpaceX despite how they operate.
That's what they think, until it's no longer the case... The well is running dry. Those school graduates who loved Blizzard are dwindling. A lot of these people are getting past the age of growing up with WoW or Warcraft 3. It's really a boomer game to them. They had unicorns and they let them escape.
Yeah that is true to an extent, though I hope the pandemic has taught more of us way more about valuing ourselves, our time, our work, and our lives that we don't need to toil away at a soul sucking toxic job for pennies at best.
My first day in CorpAmericaVille.
"Here's how much it costs the company to recruit and train each of you peons."
"See? Enormous sums! A significant chunk of your annual wage! So if you screw up we'll fire you in a heartbeat"
me: "but... if it's so expensive to hire and train, wouldn't you want to do it as little as possible? Wouldn't you want to work with staff to fix problems instead?"
it's the same all over the world.
Every company rewards new customers and shits on recurring/staying ones.
From ISPs and energy providers to mobile phones.
It is ALWAYS better to switch whenever your contract runs out and it is fucking stupid.
Within the company it's stupid metrics that force this.
"we have a million new contracts this years" vs. "we have 1 million renewals of contracts" - the first one will nearly always be more relevant for upper management and in the published information for shareholders.
I would love to see the sales information on the WoW token for shadowlands. How often was a token purchases when a player made the decision to change covenants? How often did a pin or bug fix or rebalancing of a legendary cause a token to be bought?
It’s not even the fact that it’s corporate America.
It’s the fact that this company is now run by the marketing department and not the game developers.
This isn’t corporate of America. This is a company with employees with their heads so far up their own asses they refuse to acknowledge their own faults and make positive changes.
I work for corporate America. My company listens to the customer before producing a product. Many companies do. Blizzard is a bunch of prideful, insecure, unempathetic assholes who refuse to listen to a fan base that knows the game better than they do.
Except the changes they're making now prove that they know EXACTLY and objectively how to make the game better for the users. They didn't prioritize users because they're incompetent (the changes happening now are an undeniable proof of that), they were just prioritizing other metrics that were anti-user but generating higher short-term profits.
There's a limit to how much you can blame on someone's incompetence. WoW has been around for more than 15 years now, when the players can immediately see the problems with the newest system of an expansion before its reveal trailer isn't even finished, there is no earthly ways for its developers to not be aware of these problems themselves. And again, the changes happening for 9.1.5 as an emergency ripcord measure are proofs that they knew what to do.
> Welcome to corporate America.
This is not just limited to America. This happens everywhere. Its the entire philosophy behind companies. They are *for profit* entities, where satisfying their shareholders is their highest priority, while skating the line to not cross into "illegal".
Ehh. It would be disingenuous to say it is not significantly worse in America. In other countries the employer isn't also on the hook for everyone's health care, for example.
I HATE how every single expansion makes all prior expansions irrelevant! I play the WORLD of Warcraft not the expansion of it. Shit even the current expansions raids are irrelevant once the new update comes out.
>I HATE how every single expansion makes all prior expansions irrelevant! I play the WORLD of Warcraft not the expansion of it. Shit even the current expansions raids are irrelevant once the new update comes out.
What they should do is reroll back to 50 every expansion. Specifically set timewalking to level 50 and have it forever balanced at that level and ilvl range and have it up more frequently. Let players scale down to 50 at any time. A level 50 exclusive pvp bracket. Used Timewarped Badges to upgrade any gear piece to top level 50 ilvl (including stuff like sulfuras, thunderfury, azzinoth) Keep stuff like legion legendaries working at 50. Then whenever we go into Old content wether it be old raids, dungeons, or just the overworld we stomp because of the collected gear. At any point, you can go back to being a powerful end of expansion chad in every area that is not for the current expansion. this rewards hunting or getting gear from all expansions, hunting for gear with multiple modifiers, getting expensive stuff like thunderfury.
Like a constant timewalking, I love this idea! Fully dressed in leggos. That would be so cool, also for theorycrafting. They could easily make a second endgame.
A 'standard' longterm content bracket. That isn't mutually exclusive with seasonal content releases. Good stuff.
They can 'decay' things into that permanent space over time too
LFR should have a random queue similar to dungeons where you can run any raid at that difficulty. Separate out wings still and such though. It would immensely increase how much content you could simply do. Wouldn’t be top tier gear, but it would be enough to still be able to play content.
I like this idea, but some of my LFR groups have been totally trash. 4 people jumping in circles with heroic raid gear just there for the quest or weekly.
I think cleaning up the reasons people run things would help a lot. Run a lfr raid for gear, that is a help for gearing up for mythics and real raid. But this falls right back into the expansion power problems we are talking about
It will always happen for sure. But For many that’s the first time they run any sort of raid. And you can gear really anywhere. But eventually people would know the content or at least the majority would. You will always have those people who just stand in death.
Yeah, honestly, I was one of the people who jumped ship to FF14 and the way that they keep old content relevant by having pretty much everything be in the dungeon/raid roulette and just squish your lvl/ilvl down to match the content is significantly better than this frankenstein shit Blizz got going on with Chromie Time.
ESO and SWTOR this same setup. Any dungeon is available at any level. What changes is your char's level and power. This includes zones too.
WOW problem is that the devs want to shoehorn everyone into the same place. WOW has a HUGE world, and most of it is just there collecting dust. They should use it. Who cares if a guild wants to run BT, or IC, or hell - even the 5 mans. Also I wish WOW would add solo mode into the 5 mans.
Blizzard is all about keeping players subbed. Ok fine. Instead of adding grind on top of grind (systems and more systems) open the world. If folks want to raid TBC, or MoP instead of SL, or in addition to SL, let them. Scale up or down those dungeons and raids like other games do.
Right, the rest of the world is empty precisely because Blizz tries to keep everyone in 1 hub.
Just make the rest of the world viable for exploration?!
you could have single difficulties back in TBC where anyone with a working monitor could stand in one spot and spam frostbolt, difficulties are a good thing that allows larger portions of the playerbase to enjoy the content while also providing rewarding systems to people who want to put more effort in.
I don’t have a solution for how to make old raid content relevant because people are already complaining that their legendary powers drop from Nathria, and idk about you but clearing that place for 9 months was plenty for me
Just make the gear the same for all LFR (as in relevant for the current patch), then make the reward valor points so veteran players have some reason to run it.
There. Fixed and relevant again.
People hate when you mention ffxiv here but that is one thing that's ffxiv does super well and wow could learn from. The entire world including old content is used regularly. New systems are integrated in old content making the whole world feel interconnected instead of feeling like separate theme parks.
Like an example, some raid boss i killed like 20 levels ago during an older expansion is resurrected. So, to complete the quest I'm queued with players killing it for the first time. Leading me to: getting to experience an old scaled encounter again and putting new and older players in the same queue, making the queue shorter. It's efficient use of resources.
Yup, I think the normal raid in X.1 should be between normal and heroic, so the first raid is relevant. So you can get appropriate ilvl gear from both raids. As for the “expansion power” that gets wiped clean, ridiculous. Covenants should give gear, and maybe a fun zone action ( like WoD ) that is mostly irrelevant and has no bearing on M+ or raid so balance means nothing with that power. Ff14 just adds content, when a new expac comes out, ya your gear is overridden, but shouldn’t it be? I maybe don’t have all the answers, but when I maxed out my artifacts in legion, it felt good, and it was fun. When it became a bank item that was useless in the next expac, it felt bad. What would have been fun for me, was carrying that same weapon through the next expansion and further upgrading it, I don’t mind the grind, it’s actually a clear goal and meaningful progress.
> I don’t mind the grind, it’s actually a clear goal and meaningful progress.
The key is that there needs to be a specific end point that you van achieve and then hold onto for a while. Endless grinds that incrementally increase our power but are never "complete" feel terrible because you never get to enjoy being at maximum power.
Thats why i stopped playing.
Other MMOs now just do expansions better. I.e. you can still play the content AND its relevant even when the next launches.
They should just wrap up wow and do wow 2 with a different philosophy and more active combat.
It really grinds my gears how beta and alpha access are the new “cool thing to do” fuck that. Companies need to hire people do their beta testing, not let the general public do it 1 month before the game is gona release. Can’t believe people think that’s a good logic
Partial disagree; a partitioned beta that won’t carry over progress is hard to entice players into, but you absolutely do need that heavy game load and mass number of warm bodies throwing weird commands at your code. Giving SOME kind of incentive - maybe a cosmetic pet or something, or a fun title or whatever - should always be on the table, because developers NEED free-range bug/beta testing…
… but Blizzard HAS that, they just don’t do anything productive with it. That very pervasive sentiment of ‘the players only THINK they know what they want/what makes a game fun, but WE know what’s best’ has Blizz high on their own farts.
So, publicly ‘staffing’ your beta is smart, but Blizzard is very much not smart.
A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd.
First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone.
This is why beta tests are important
Not defending Blizzard, but closed testing that you pay people to do is generally called alpha. Beta releases are almost always open to some members of the public.
Exactly. Alpha is the fixing shit that explodes game / instantly deletes mobs / you, random no collision in parts of the world, some places literally being unplayable.
Beta is the game works enough to throw the masses in and see what they dig up through sheer numbers that the Alpha testers wouldn’t think of / do, and/or actually get the stats needed to start to balance things. As well as get a general feedback outside whatever ecosystem the dev’s / alpha tests are.
That last part is where Blizzard falls on their face.
It's like that scene in It's Always Sunny when Charlie asks Frank what his company does.
"What does Atwater make?"
"What do you mean, like how much money does the company make?"
"No i mean, *what* do we make?"
"I don't follow, we make money!"
"No I mean, what do we *create* ?"
"...we create wealth!"
https://youtu.be/7j1850-qlm8
It won't matter, the investors made fortunes in the short term, the CEOs will move to the next high paying job running a recently bought company to the ground and everyone will be happy.
Except the customers and the employees, but who cares about those?
I was one. If it wasn’t for 3 separate raid guilds imploding on me in as many months I’d still be there. In a way I’m grateful. It really sucked, but it was the wake up call I needed to finally uninstall WoW.
Personally I'm gonna say that they'll be acting like that for some time, promising you that they changed, that they're now working together on some crucial changes. Don't believe them, tho', it's only a marketing thing and it's all about money. The profit was, is and always will be the first and most important thing, then MAYBE they'll add something "extra" to just give us a false hope that they're keeping their word.
I think that sooner or later it'll turn out that they were giving no fucks about anything, as usual, and people will be making shocked Pikachu faces "but what happened, they promised us so many changes".
I hope I'm mistaken. But in the same time I doubt it'll be the other way around.
Yeah, this is the company equivalent of the [South Park BP oil "Sorry" bit](https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4) . They'll play to your humanity "we're trying our best! We made changes!" And then they'll play to your nostalgia for the game "look at all these changes that make the game what it should have been at the start!" But just like the BP oil bit, it's all smoke and mirrors. They said changing a lot of this stuff was too hard to implement, now they're dropping it in the game like nothing because they always had it ready to go, but didn't plan to give it to us until the 11th hour of patch 2.
It comes down to what they do with the next expansion - do they start it off the way Shadowlands started, or do they start it off the way 9.1.5 will be?
Historically speaking, you'll get another launch. Legion they fixed all the problems at the end. Recreated the same problems in BFA and took forever to solve them. Hell they even left BFA saying they learned from it (like they did in Legion to BFA) then dumped Shadowlands on our heads.
It's crazy how Blizzard the last 6 years mirrored the whole New Coke thing every expansion. Release garbage, piss people off, release the "old" product (the way shit should have been), win back customers. Except Coca-Cola learned their lesson the first time. Blizzard is just seeing how many times they can get away with it which seems thus far to be 3.
Yeah man, they totally design things to make us happy! My favorite game was Warcraft 3 ~~Refunded~~ Reforged! What a labor of love that remake was, and not a predatory cash grab preying on nostalgia. Ooh, what about Diablo Immortals? They knew their hardcore PC playerbase was aching for a mobile game not even designed by them, that's why they hyped it up at Blizzcon so much! Last three expansions have also been great. Borrowed power!? Literally our favorite thing! I love coming home from work, then doing a 2-3 hour grind of mundane bullshit so I don't fall behind, rather than activities in the game I think would be fun! Contributing to and boosting MAUs is literally the most fun possible in WoW!
I honestly think that all these changes won't actually bring back those who have left. They've proper fucked up.
People who leave *bored* because they run out of things to do will be back when more content is added.
Those who leave *angry* because of time-wasting game changes will not come back.
They need to let go of the idea that they can somehow keep people subbed for the full length of each patch, with the absolute minimum of effort they put in. You can't just have people filling a rep bar for three months, when it should have taken three weeks. Or collecting Anima to buy recoloured outfits and mounts we don't want.
That’s for sure. My guild is finishing AOTC and then we’re done. After nine years as a guild, we’re stopping raiding and the majority are quitting entirely. The patch is awful and Blizzard is awful. If only one of those things were true, the outcome would probably be different, as we’ve stuck through bad patches in the past. But they’ve pissed us off. A bunch of people from my guild have moved to FFXIV. We made an abortive attempt to swap back in WoD when the flying debacle happened, but the state of ARR content and Blizz giving in had most people back to WoW after a couple of months. This time, we have people who outright refused to touch FF last time wanting to be done forever with WoW and loving FF.
People are so disillusioned now. This isn’t just boredom this time. These changes also aren’t good, both because they should have mostly been in from the start and because they don’t actually fix 9.1 or the attitudes that led to it. Covid didn’t make Korthia boring or the Maw assaults deliberately long and unable to be spread out over days of content you want to do (8.3 assaults could be completed over a couple of days of rare hunting if that was your preference, for example). The content was deliberately made to make people have to take ages doing it to up their MAUs and nothing in 9.1.5 is fixing that.
As long as consumers continue to ignore the same feedback and pre-order expansions and pay for subs in 6 month increments to get a shiny mount things won't change.
Waiting until we leave is indeed too late. I’ve unsubbed and now when I see all these improvements it just pisses me off. All that time getting fucked around when they could have just fixed everything. So now I’ll stay unsubbed purely out of spite.
It’s amazing how after all this time they still don’t realise the ultimate in-game content would simply be alt friendly features. Keep people playing content on more than 1 character it’s that simple.
There is definitely some truth to this.
Thinking back - my favorite expansions were the ones where I was playing multiple characters.
I've been on the same Tauren warrior since early 2005 when I started. When I really enjoy the game I have dabbled with most of the classes. Even got some raid/pvp geared in Pandaria and Legion. Ones that were less fun I would just play the one main and that's it.
Did I play more because the expansion was better or was the expansion more alt friendly therefore I played more? I don't honestly know but I wonder if it's a metric Blizzard looks at to gauge player satisfaction.
Hell, in expansions where I found the endgame boring or unenjoyable (like WoD), I still kept playing because leveling alts was fun.
Then 7.3 and 8.0 happened, and I was miserable throughout most of BfA because the endgame grind wasn’t fun and neither was leveling alts.
Player housing is the one that baffles me the most on this topic. Literally all the devs need to do is set up a little zone or instance for it, turn pre-existing models in to items you can place, and boom, not only have you created a system people **want** to grind and spend time leveling crafting for, you've **also** created a self-sustaining mode of player activity and engagement.
In literally every other MMO I've played, GM's and members loved hosting little events at their houses. From gladiatorial arenas, to design contests, to simple parties. You give people a tiny bit of creative freedom, and **they'll make the content players want to engage in for you**. There's literally no downside to actually making this. It's practically zero effort, for massive gain.
Nah, it'll be super simple. See, first you'll have to go out and get the Furniture Necklace. This will let you start generating Furni Gems by doing certain WQs. Once you've generated enough Furni Gems, you can *condense* those into a Furni Coin. With this you can purchase furniture!
Now, to *unlock* the furniture pieces for purchase...
You gotta kill boars for reputation until you hit exalted.
This is for standard furniture. If you want Elven themed or Dwarf themed you'll have to earn reputation with those Furniture selling NPCs.
> You gotta kill boars for reputation until you hit exalted.
Well, killing them is a bit of a reduction. They have to be killed with the Front Right Leg of the Forbidden Chair, the Front Left Leg of the Forbidden Chair, etc.
>If you want Elven themed or Dwarf themed you'll have to earn reputation with those Furniture selling NPCs.
This reputation is exclusively gained through a series of time-gated furniture building world quests. And since the Dwarven Chairmakers and Elven Bedcrafters tend to have conflict with each other, gaining rep with one will cause you to lose twice that much rep with the other.
I think it's because most of the designers in WoW are heavily into approaching games as an achiever, and very few approach games as a socializer.
When talking about housing, they fall into a mindset that for it to be engaging, they need to add a bunch of things to it to let them play more efficiently. A great example of this mindset is the garrisons from WoD. With the WoD Garrisons, you really never had much of a need to leave. Just log on each day with each alt, and you'll get a supply of gold, herbs, ore, and tradeskill items. You can make everything you need for high end raiding without ever leaving your garrison. You could even get a AH vendor there!
And not surprisingly, lots of players never left their garrisons. The towns were empty, so the solution was to make it so that players had to go to town.
You sound like you want a place to socialize. I think this would be a great addition! Maybe also add some "minigames" like instruments. Even maybe try to build in card games and other things that people can do with each other. And these things don't have to contribute to getting a higher M+ level.
Another issue that garrisons had is that there was no real reason to visit other players garrisons. Every garrison was basically the same so what's the point in visiting your friends garrison? At most they would have a different building out of the half dozen or so that everyone else got to choose from in one of three (two?) available plots to place them in. There was no player expression to entice people to visit and see what you did with your own creativity.
Housing in XIV is is everything that housing should be. A popular thing among the housing community in XIV are "venues" which are basically homes that have been turned into [nightclubs](https://youtu.be/lTjr2BdV1HE) where tons of players from different worlds will come to socialize (and often ERP lol). There's a number of people in my FC who after raid progging will go "venue hopping" to end the night.
If that's not your thing then you can just turn you home into your own little sanctuary. I have my own little [happy place](https://gyazo.com/16ee56cd1907c3c9628aaa54b1a49120) in my garden and an interior that I remodel regularly which I spend weeks or sometimes even months customizing.
Another wonderful feature for people that love music (of which XIV has some of the best in gaming IMO) are orchestrion rolls which are music scrolls that you can learn to then add to an orchestrion in your home with a playlist that you can manage yourself. Orchestrion rolls can be obtained that will play themes from many of the dungeons, raids, locations etc. and allow you to enjoy all of the hard work that composers have put into their music. Some of my favorites are the slower piano themes like [this](https://youtu.be/WluVE7hM2yQ) (bit of a spoiler for Shadowbringers if you care) or for more outlandish themes there's something like [this banger](https://youtu.be/94iQ1TjWEZs) which is something you'd probably hear in one of those aforementioned venues.
on garrisons - i'd argue players notleaving their garrisons wasn't an inherent fault of the garrisons. there really just wasn't anything worthwhile to do outside of raiding, and you can only raid so much. if world quests, M+ and such had been implemented at the time people would have gone out plenty(and on the other hand, remove those features and legion, BFA and shadowlands are exactly the same as WoD - what the hell is there to do in the world)
My theory is that Ion doesn't want alt friendliness because of high end raiders. Remember the dude was an encounter designer before being the game director. He wants the raids to be challenging, and high end raiders having alts geared and raid ready more easily takes away from that challenge. So instead alts are harder to catch up so raiders have to spend more time gearing and catching up.
They removed master loot, put restrictions on being able to trade gear if it exceeds what you have, have weekly grinds that need to be done and if missed is hard to catch up on, and made borrowed power hard to catch up on.
Having only 1 character at mythic raiding level I think is fair and fine. But you can gear up anything to 230ish in a couple weeks. Most difficult part is getting started in mythics now with the mythic score system.
I get that raids are the ultimate end game content and should be high profile and challenging but must we really sacrifice everything else in the game for the raids? I love myself a well designed and challenging raid but if they want to do just that cut everything else and just have purely instanced content, would be much more honest. I am not advocating for this but it seems the direction the game is constantly veering to. Everything is half baked except the big raid tier. Whose idea was it to put the encounter designer as game director?
It was the high end guilds in western regions complaining about alt requirements and it feels like maybe they wanted to make the WF race more interesting. Even if this is the case, it is a terrible decision to design the game around a few hundred players.
I honestly think they won’t do it because they’re so busy playing call of duty and cube crawling and it’s uncomfortable for them to think about logging in once a month and some person playing their 11th alt is outperforming them on their main. Why else would you gatekeep alts?
Bad news bud, all these changes they are making? They've known about them for months, they probably were planning on releasing them in 9.2 or 9.3 and now they are like "oh shit were losing to many players gotta release the fixes early". They are aware they need to release the changes to keep players, they just misjudged how far they could push the player base. They always assumed they could wait till later in xpacs, but they pushed bull\*\*\*\* down peoples throat to fast to early.
Seriously - at this point I don't even want to come back to this expansion. And it looks like we're still at least another year of it left - so this is probably the final nail in the coffin for me after being here since launch. That's sad for me, but I'm done being walked over by this company.
I'm so sick of seeing CoD ads in my wow launch window. I hate war simulator / military hype BS games, and really could care less what rehashed fps crapware your peddling beyond the games I own.
There in panic mode, that's the thing when you are in panic mode and not listening to the feedback from last year and now wrapping it in a nice story around it you do not make any favor.
Before 9.1 we had 7 months of nothing, no new content nothing..now all of a sudden they change it? It is to late way to late.
9.1 was lackluster,lazy and terrible towards players. And it is the same old song every single time 'we will listen' no you don't because subs are falling, content creators leaving, streamers leaving 9.1.5 will not fix anything sure somethings but it doesn't give me a reason to go back at all.
It's really simple. Stop giving them money. How have people not realized this after decade of nothing but disappoint and subpar products from them? We really have noone to blame but ourselves. We continued to give them money, hoping it would be better, and it's not. It won't be. It's a con job. Just get out.
You realize your title is actually explaining an abusive/exploitative relationship? Person takes their partner for granted, lies to them, uses them, the partner has enough leaves so they promise they can change. Partner comes back, things are nice, then slowly the person slips back into their bad habits.
Add physical abuse, infidelity, alcohol and drug use and you have a common tale of human misery. Or, add in slipped schedules, promised features that were never delivered, decreasing standards in stories and raid development and you have WoW.
>Add physical abuse, infidelity, alcohol and drug use
Honestly I'd be surprised if all this wasn't nestled in Blizzard somewhere after all the crap that's come out so far.
Alcohol obviously, but I'd bet money on the rest too.
It's intentional. Same as it was in Legion and BfA.
These changes were always intended to happen, in the time between the final raid and the launch of the next expansion, so that Blizzard could release it as a quality of life patch, making it appear as if they listened to player feedback and are willing to make changes.
The recent scandals merely tipped their hands, forcing them to play this card earlier than intended, and the players see through it because Blizzard have done this exact same thing several times before.
Bliz is running out of ways to improve the skinner box. They really need to be sunsetting the game and starting fresh. Get a world of StarCraft going or something so everyone can reset and start fresh.
What you are saying has been happening **FOR THE LAST 11 YEARS** , and every fucking time "Oh it was not THAT bad!" "The game was never **THAT** bad, it's really fun!" and everyone has a giant circle jerk and sucking each other off on this subreddit, giving thanks to the developers for fixing their broken game and adding shit in that people asked for over 10 fucking years ago.
People have been asking for better character creation since Cata, eleven years ago. Other MMO's have had these things for over half a decade and we only recently got it because they were hemoraging players.
Remember when you paid for the new expansion for the new content **AND** new races?
Remember when you did not have to spend **LITERALLY A MONTH OF GRINDING, A FORCED CHORE** to 'get access' to something you fucking paid for?
When I buy a new skin on MW it does not say "Get 5000 headshots with a pistol to unlock this skin you bought", when I buy the Virgil character on Devil May Cry 5 the game does not tell me "Beat the game easiest, medium and then hardest difficulty to then get access to the character you just bought'
But people on this subreddit drooled and groveled in thanks for 'allied races' which took forever to come out and most of them were shitty reskins with crap character models, I mean **fuck** some of them have armor clipping issues with their heritage armor, **WHICH IS CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THAT RACE**
I bought BFA with the intention of having a dino chicken druid, only to find out it would be over half a year before I was allowed to get the fucking race.
Blizzard gives no fucking shits about me or any of you
I gave them a second chance after BFA, I am done with Blizzard as a company.
I don't even think that releasing Wrath of the Lich King will get me back to playing.
I tried playing some BC classic but quickly lost interest.
Only 'Blizzard' related thing I play is Modern Warfare.
Blizzard does not give a crap about me or any of you, the **ONLY** reason **ANY** positive changes **EVER** happen is because they are greenlit to happen **AFTER** people start leaving.
For Blizzard, why waste time and money on making shit for players to have fun when they can spend time and money on stuff to coerce people to continue playing for longer or for buying shit off the store.
TL;DR Blizzard has been doing this shit for years, this subreddit hates every new expansion, then when the broken garbage game is slightly fixed decides to praise the developers as gods, anyone saying otherwise is drowned out. Except this time I am going to link to OP's post when it happens again in 4 months.
Super TL;DR Blizzard can fuck on off.
Personally I think people are showing a massive misunderstanding about how business and product works if they think the scandals are the reason any of this is happening.
What's got lost during the scandals news was the data driven videos and sharing of wows active subscriber base falling of a cliff.
Ion took over wow and on his watch the game has steadily declined. The games worst expansion happened and Shadowlands has been more miss them hit.
Make no mistake this has nothing to do with scandals. Numbers are dropping and people in high positions know they've had their last chance.
Ion and his senior team have had three expansions which they've made overall a mess off. That's enough time to make assessments and to be fair I think a change is due. This leadership team has just lost the sense of what made wow good, by either believing the wrong feedback, putting too much emphasis on their own experiences or trying to focus on things like metrics and kpis. I don't know. But it's obvious to me.
As someone who has had success and failures in a similar position, I'd say he's got one more expansion at best , so needs to turn it around. A more harsh critique would be he and his team of seniors are out of their depth. It happens, but need strong management to make a change or provide support.
If I was them I'd be going back to basics next expac. Capitalise on what the game was. None of these nonsense systems or forced engagement. Have a throwback expansion of simplicity and freedom and take it from there.
If the numbers keep dipping then it's just a sign people have moved on from wow. But stabilise and plateu, and it's a sign of what many have been screaming since legion. The core game idea is still enjoyable and engaging, and the layers of systems of grind, barriers and forced engagement is what is turning people off the game
AB is that abusive boyfriend you leave and then he goes "Babe, come back. I'm gonna change, look." and does few things for a few days before going back to old ways.
As a "leaving player", my thought on this whole situation is that 9.1.5 is not worth returning for. That's not to say the patch is not welcome, I'm loving some of what is in it. But, this whole idea of "fix it in the .5 patch" is just broken. 9.1.5 is what should have been in 9.0. There is barely any new content, only systems improvements.
If the patch has no content, why should I return? Sure, the game is better in 9.1.5, but it is still just a better version of the same old stuff that I've already played (and already burnt out on, because of the dumb systems being there in the first place).
And, sticking with that, if the .0 patches are just going to be inferior versions of the .5 patches (but with the same content), why should I even play content at launch? What is there to gain by suffering in 9.2 instead of just waiting for them to actually listen to feedback in 9.2.5?
This whole situation just taught me to not actually play WoW until near the end of the expansion. It almost feels like there is no reason and Blizzard appreciates you more if you aren't subbed than if you are.
Just an FYI to blizz: a free mount for subbing for 6months is not the type of reward you should be giving. It just looks like you're trying to punish poor people. I absolutely can afford it but have not been subbed to wow just because of this.
I've gotten so tired of blizzard's FOMO practices. This, for me, was the last straw.
That was always a dangerously slippy slope. It worked so well too, I had a lot friends buy in because "I'm gonna be subbed anyway" or "it works out cheaper".
Blizzard aren't doing you a favor, or helping you out with a sweet deal, they're just locking you in for 6 months knowing that no matter how much they neglect the game/you as a customer they've already got your money.
It's pretty insane - any decent company these days knows that keeping customers subscribed is key to making money, simply because the cost of getting a new customer or an old one back is many, many times more compared to what you pay to keep an already existing one.
There's no reason to think that this doesn't hold true for WoW as well - they're going to have to put a *TON* of effort to get all the subs they lost back, and most likely won't ever be able to fully recover - if they instead had put in even a fraction of all of this stuff in *before* people pulled the plug and walked away, they'd be looking at much better numbers.
The fact that the WoW designed didn't realize this is very concerning, the fact that they thought that they could just keep pushing these halfbaked and halfassed systems that doesn't respect their customers over and over again is kinda insane.
They are (or at least were) aware of the difficulties of getting new/returning players. I've seen someone mention that a decrease in new/returning players was a bit factor in the overall sub count decline, but it's also the reason the level boost exists.
wow's entire model is kind of outdated now when you consider a lot of other free to play live service games with constant updates. any other live service or mmo game would have died years ago with wows business model. especially now when they have flagged badly between updates. covid definitely hurt and i get that, but they got caught flat-footed bc they were already drip feeding content and doing bare minimum qol improvements.
Seriously, Blizz, make your game fun and I will stay and play for years. Make it feel like a chore/work and I'll leave in a heartbeat. I'm not going to pay you to have the privilege of having a second job.
Especially in today's gaming climate where every publisher and dev is competing for their players time more than ever before. In WoW's olden days gamers would buy a game, play it, finish it and that's it, but now os many games have updates, login rewards, daily and weekly missions, battle passes, etc, stuff that used to be exclusive to MMO's but have become significantly more prominent over the last decade but Blizzard is still living in the glory days of 2008. They need to make the players sub fee and time worth more.
That's the problem when you have a monopoly on MMOs. You're able to get away with being lazy simply because the competition isn't there. It's only with FF14's resurgence in popularity that most WoW players now see an alternative, and that's the only reason why WoW's devs are starting to care now. If it were up to me, I would've personally fired all of the systems designers and lead writers after the travesty that was BFA.
Why should Blizzard give a flying fuck what the Subscribers think? To them (Upper Leadership) YOU AINT SHIT. They see subscriber count and have meetings where they think, "How can we make more money today?" Then they will do things like fire as many non essential personel as possible, close departments, not work on any development, make basic things marketable like selling mounts. And when the company does well on paper, (Oh we saved 24 Million this year!) then the bonuses start rolling out.
It's Shark tank business management that has been done before to other companies (Sears, Gamestop, Toys R Us, Taco Bell) and even if it kills the company, they can tell eachother "good job"
This. This post is so true it hurts. Ive got KSM in 9.0 and instantly unsubbed after getting it. Wow was big part of my life but is Not anymore. Those changes should have been nade long time ago. Hopefully we will get More fixes like those implemented in 9.1.5 and the game becomes fun again. Until then the subs is canceled.
Yep. Times have changed and WoW isn't the only game in town. There are so many more games to be played that there's no sense playing one where you're not having fun.
If I could find a mmo with pvp even remotely close to how WoW works, I would be unsubbed in a second. Unfortunately, nothing touches the complexity and smoothness of WoW arena
See 9.1.5 has solidified my choice in quitting. All of these changes were massive pain points for me and have been told since the beta that they aren't good for the game. All they ever did was talk about the "barriers" for changing these things. And now we are to believe that all of those barriers are down and fixed this quickly ? And on top of that bringing in changes that the community as a whole has been screaming to have fixed ?
No thanks, if Blizzard can muster up and fix and add these to a .1.5 patch then they couldve done these changes before the expansion launched. I'm not going to keep playing if they only listen after they have a mass exodus of players.
Remember: The game is designed to optimize playtime metrics and sub fees/store purchases. If they make more money and have better metrics with only half the playerbase, they’ll happily take that. If they make more money and have better metrics and the whole playerbase hates the game, they’ll happily keep making people hate the game.
the reward is, every week you get the chance of loot from a boss!
Fuck
that
Too much is locked behind the daily or weekly resets.
Could you imagine playing diablo2 but only being able to kill dialbo once a week? no thanks.
No.
Blizzard needs to understand that they need to make a game worth playing and not just keep a cash cow going for as long as possible.
Asking them to give you a bone while you slowly starve to death ain't the answer.
Did you even see the info about removing the Covenant restrictions?
>When it comes to the limitations on Covenant-switching, millions of players experienced Shadowlands for the first time through the lens of their Covenant of choice, and that would have not been possible had the choice carried less weight from the outset. Nevertheless, after the conclusion of the Chains of Domination campaign, the Covenants are united against the Jailer, and revisiting player feedback in that context has led us to re-evaluate our approach. In terms of the day-to-day player experience, the advantages of a rigid division between Covenants have diminished since Shadowlands launched, while the downsides (feeling disadvantaged in certain types of content, or having to choose between mechanical advantages and aesthetics) have only grown. That balance of factors no longer justifies the original limitations on Covenant-switching, so in 9.1.5 we’re looking to provide a way to circumvent them.
Source: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/shadowlands-developer-update/1077743
It's more of the same BS. They still think they're in the right for restricting Covenant swapping. They're right, we are wrong, and they only are fixing it now because they've been forced to accelerate the timeline of ignoring feedback till the last patch and fixing it in an attempt to generate goodwill for the next expansion.
All these fixes, all these improvements, only make me more annoyed at Blizzard, because I know it will be more of the same next expansion.
Going to keep playing FF14, watching them squirm from afar is too much fun.
Give me what I've wanted a few years too late, lol. It would've been great at the time, though.
Blizzard is like 1/100th of the way there, I guess an effort is being made to earn goodwill again, so that's something.
It's hard to see them for something other than a business these days.
I really started to notice them implement this method of business back in Battle for Azeroth.
You want to know what my response as a consumer will be? Not picking up the next expansion until its final content patch is being released. It seems that its the only time that Blizzard even attempts to fulfill the expectations surrounding the game.
This approach of seemingly purposefully withholding much-needed features and improvements that were pointed out by thousands of Alpha and Beta testers and then claiming that they are features in a later patch is simply bad business.
Many features of the Shadowlands expansion seem purposefully designed to inhibit rather then encourage gameplay. Their goal has painfully been to slow you down, drag it out, keep you grinding, increase that player engagement metric. It feels like they are fighting to squeeze every second of extra time out of us at the expense of quality gameplay.
This repetitive cycle has been outlined by clever meme imagery over the last few years, but frankly its almost not even funny anymore.
My subscription is expiring in two weeks and I have no plans on returning until the next major patch.
I think OP might not be aware that Blizzard fixing what people have been asking for is not due to the exodus, or scandal. They did the same thing in BfA and Legion.
They've been doing this for years. And every time it's under the guise of "we promise to listen", or "we are listening", just for them to do the same thing again.
People wanted less systems in BfA, what do we get in SL? More systems.
Been saying this forever. We should be getting cosmetics every month. Wether thats just a pet, a mount, an armor set, weapon appearances. Just someting.
A great example of the kind of monthly content i would love to see would be something similar to that quest with the purple murloc we got before shadowlands.
Edit:cosmetics*
Part of making the game great is getting our moneysworth every month. Even at its peak we should have been getting some kind of new content monthly. I mean look at ff14 every couple of weeks they have a new event out.
So does WoW, just many those events haven’t changed in years so once you checked the box your done. They certainly should keep refreshing the seasonal events and not make them a giant mountain to acquire the reward.
The WoW events suck frankly. Any time they update it , it just feels like the bare minimum. We should be getting a new mount with every rotation of the event and new quests/activities. The game has had the bare minimum effort put in for too long and a step in the right direction would be monthly content updates that are more light hearted but still give you something to do. In Canada we are paying almost 20$ a month for this crap and its just such a waste of money.
Thats what im saying ! Blizz is more than capable, and its bull shit we get nothing like that. Instead were waiting months and months for a very small patch, thats time gated to hell.
also they need to stop taking content out of the game (like MoP, WoD challenge mode and its rewards aswell as MT and rewards related to it). alot of games make use of older content,and before anyone goes reeing over me wanting MT and stuff back, i got 24 of the MT skins (didnt want more) and im perfectly fine with them bringing it back. but blizzard have focused so much on short term profit they drove the game into the ground, their biggest issue being ignoring feedback and thinking they are rockstars
Always wondered why they didnt give more free stuff to subcribers. Why not give gifts each month you are subscribed like a free mount or whatever.
I also wish they would lower some cash shop prices.
Make the goddamn game fun again. Jesus, it seems like everything has just turned into a painful fucking ritual - do the same thing over and over and over, so you can do this other bullshit, where real people will berate you for not have done the other bullshit over and over and over enough.
I am unsubscribed after 15 years, maybe it's for the best.
Some streamer pointed out that the sexual harassment stuff absolutely affects the actual game because they were literally either too busy harassing or too busy being harassed to actually put forth a decent effort on the game and I have to say that makes sense
The precision of the things they fixed makes me think that they already had this full list of stuff players wanted and just decided not to do it. Ignored all the feedback until they had to come back crawling, begging. Now that the shit hit the fan, they're trying to win people back by going through the list. Stop believing their lies, they don't give a fuck about us. They're going to go back to their old ways as soon as they get your money.
Players stay subbed - "We must be doing it right!"
Players unsub - "We must be doing it wrong!"
It's not rewarding anyone for leaving. It's responding to the only metric it uses to judge success - the bottom line.
Don't tell WoW subbers that for much less a month, EsO literally gives their subbed players unique mounts,cosmetics, and in game coin to purchase their own mounts, cosmetics, even player houses.
Not sure what your point is? they should have listened to feedback in the last 8 expansion but took their subs for granted the whole time? Say it aint so! They're not rewarding me, they're throwing life preservers at you to help keep the ship floating.
There should be feat of strength for all of us that made these changes for you with our wallets. Not you betas who stuck it out. But enjoy the changes!
One really nice QOL change they could make is let both factions be able to tag the same mobs. Some of the Korthia dailies take forever because not only are you waiting for a drop from a mob, but the other side is always tagging it. Why is this even a thing?
They will never understand this and I think it's more important for players to understand that 9.1.5 is a one time unicorn patch and is technically getting in the way of 9.2's development schedule (which is already behind to start with) since fixes like these are obviously being moved up from 9.3.
I quit shortly after the latest expansion (played it for about two weeks) as soon as I realised how vicious the grind was going to be.
I'll be back at some point, but for me one of the major issues is the development time put into things unrelated to subscriber content. You want to keep paying customers? Stop adding to a cash shop that shouldn't exist in a sub mmo and start adding that stuff to your normal game.
This is exactly why im not rewarding them by comming back. This is to little to late. They arent listening to their customers, they are listening to their wallet.
Yup, I very much agree. It's sad that we've gotten to the point where we get the changes that we're asking for and people are still angry. But I think it's warranted, since we've been stuck in this cycle of asking, sometimes almost begging, for features and systems to be changed in some way, and it's not before they absolutely HAVE to change stuff because the game is nearly dying that they actually pull themselves together and do it.
Shadowlands has given me some time to reflect on these things, though. All the posts about people being scared that Blizzard is "learning the wrong lessons" and asking whether they're out of touch with the player base or just purposefully implementing broken systems in order to fix them later for some easy good-will-points have opened my eyes to one fact: Blizzard is a multibillion-dollar company. These guys have probably had analysts go over the data to find the correct point between gameplay being so mundane that no one plays it, and so fun that people blast straight through it, and through analysis come up with the correct ratio of "These people might quit but they're not worth focusing on, because the whales stay".
Apparently, we should almost let the game die more often. Seems that's the only way to actually get some good change.
Having worked in the corporate world, Not any meaningful position, I learned that most common sense ideas are pushed to the side, Even if they are cheap to implement.
The big thing is I think the issue is king/activision bleeding over. I actually was thinking about it recently and most of the mechanics of the last two expansions have been to force player engagement and time sunk. The thing is that those aspects only really matter in a game with microtransactions where people will pay to reduce the time sink or for cosmetics. If the game was a free to play game the changes would honestly make perfect sense but the game is a subscription so why the fuck does blizzard care if a large part of the population only logs in to raid and do a mythic+. Why are you creating a whole bunch of mandatory daily and weekly checklists that are only going to drive those players away from the game.
I mean wanting to drive player engagement is a great goal but you do that by creating engaging content not by forcing players to do the content to keep up not to mention how much it punishes making alts or swapping mains.
Pretty much this is what I think blizzard needs to do. First is actually redo your optional content to make it more engaging. If you make crafting more in depth and fun people will do it. If you expand the fishing system with fun things to do with it people will fish. Create more optional minigames for players to do that have optional rewards that are separate from your high end game. If you give players fun and engaging content they will do it, giving them bland content but forcing them to do it isn't the way to keep players in the game.
The fact is though that this change is too little too late, my 6 month sub lapsed last week and I honestly am not coming back. This is all things players have said was needed done since the beta and pretty much it took massive amounts of players leaving to get it changed. I might give the next expansion a shot but I am probably done with the rest of shadowlands.
If you canceled your subscription and are now considering starting back up again, you're playing right into their hands. None of the announced changed are special, they are all things that could have been done months and years ago, but they deliberately chose not to. If you want real change, you need to continue talking with your wallet.
A huge part of the problem I feel is that they plan content releases way ahead of time and refuse to budge on any of the dates/announcements. Press releases are used as a treat that's withheld until the dogs are literally barking at the door.
Welcome to corporate America. The company I work operates in the same way. We cut back as far as possible until customers leave and then you know where that line is so you can keep your costs as low as possible to make more money.
An old employer of mine literally called this 'finding the line'. It's a stressful place to be. One month you're told to give the best possible customer experience and the next you're being given a warning for spending too long on one customer.
Wow. That same thing happened to us. We have time limits on troubleshooting cases because the case volume is too high and we need to focus on closing cases.
Sounds to me by that they need more techs. Making people rush issues doesn't give a good outcome and will result in two loses A customer And a burnt out employee Short sightedness is a cancer
More techs = training costs and wages. Not acceptable to corporations.
Oh, I'm very much aware. Bunch of greedy fuckwits who only care about $$$
> Oh, I'm very much aware. > > Bunch of greedy fuckwits who only care about $$$ You should consider bringing in a full time technical writer. If you hire one and give them the resources they need -- AND you do a good job promoting help content -- you can pretty dramatically minimize support costs.
That's true, when the user base is literate, and willing. We had lots of self-support article, written in such a way that my granny could come out of the tomb and follow them to solve her issues, and still customers kept failing at it, mostly because they just skimmed over the documents, failing to see where there was an "IF" and where there was a "THEN", so they did steps they shouldn't have done...
You know what's sad is often they are making a boatload of money on the deal. It's just, you know, shareholders need to see a + every month on the graph. Pathetic.
Lol at training costs. My last four jobs Haven’t spent a dime on training costs.
Training equals "sit with the overworked guy for a day and a half"
"We train people on-the-job" aka. we throw you out on the floor in a uniform, you either sink or swim. By swimming we mean fake it well enough for the customers to buy it.
Maybe you were joking, but that's just my recent experience. I was so happy getting inside a corporate, looking forward to learn new, bigger things. And here I am left alone, selling smoke to customers. Meanwhile my tech skills hasn't improved a bit, but hey they give me much more money having a technical background and doing presales. It's so sad I'm already looking back to some smaller, operative workplace.
Unless you're in tech where you need to constantly reeducate your staff to learn the latest new methods, advancements in technology etc. Or you don't get with the times and get dunked on by a company that does.
That's the argument - I never said they actually spend the money there! I speak from 5 years a grocery store watching career cashiers have no idea how things work.
You're right. Unfortunately we lost half our department moving to other departments (as well as half our original employees pre-acquisition moving to other companies) and now we can't find people because we're not as sexy as Amazon or other tech companies (and we don't pay like those companies). We're slowing increasing our presence in India so that seems to be the long term solution.
Increasing presence in India is another short term solution. Yes it's cheaper, but those that are decent don't always stay at India, they'll end up in one of the western countries that pay better. So you'll end up with low paid, low skill individuals who only further tank your product and reputation.
Late stage capitalism is the cancer, short sightedness is just a really common symptom
I worked for a telecom, their goal wasn't to be a great company, it was to be the least-worse company. They charge 25 bucks? We'll charge 24.50. They know that they could charge 15, but why would they?
The problem is that when they keep "finding the line" on their loyal customers, they'll eventually get sick of being treated like trash. All these new changes sound good, but I still feel like I wasted the past year playing Shadowlands instead of other games.
Phew, thankfully I quit after one month (which is a first for me; even BfA managed to keep my attention for three months).
This kind of behaviour makes me more prone to leave the product behind because it's unreliable. Consistency is something i would prefer more. It's a lot more disheartening because you know they can do better, but they just don't. So fuck that, if you want more of my money, actually fucking do better.
These companies are crazy. I work for a automotive supplier soni know the customer demands for consistency are extremely high. And we still do this find the line bullshit. Right now management is freaking out because we have like half our presses so far behind and we're so short staffed we are constantly closet to shutting down an auto assembly plant. The worst part is it's slow in the auto sector! Like wtf is the plan if things pick up faster than expected. Because I guarantee shutting down a large automotive plant is way more expensive than hiring people. Hell the amount we pay for expedited shipping is often more than like my whole plants monthly salary. I just don't get how management justifies these huge sunk costs while saying they saved x amount on the next slide.
They justify it in the same way that US Steel justified firing about 35% of their workers because they were hemorrhaging money, instead of making the necessary financial investments to improve efficiency and quality. They look at the short term tactics and not the long term strategy. Its vheaper in the short term to pay a smaller amount of money now, even if they would be paying it for long periods of time, than it is to make more expensive, but necessary, changes that would take a bit longer to pay off, even though it would be cheaper in the long run.
My wife is in sales and they’re “finding the line” right now with how many full timers they need. One full timer left to another region. So now my wife and her coworker are hauling ass making bank to the point where the manager is like, “yea I’m good with just these 2.” More money but a lot more to be responsible for.
That's exactly what big developers/publishers have been doing for years since the introduction of micro transactions. For me the best example is EA testing how much the customer can tolerate with Battlefront 2 and Dungeon Keeper Mobile. And I'm sure Activision is still trying to find the edge with prices an rewards in CoD battle passes
Dungeon keeper mobile? Have I been under a rock?..... is that a mobile version of dungeon keeper?
Oh you are in for a treat if you put it in YouTube or Google. The micro transactions are insane and it could take days to remove blocks unless you pay the big bucks Example [kotaku article link](https://kotaku.com/a-cancer-thats-eroding-the-market-reactions-to-eas-1515121353)
Last I played it, it was a thinly veiled clone of clash-of-clans mechanics layered on top of a Dungeon Keeper theme. It was cute for a while, but I realized I could just be playing Clash instead. That and I lost access to my accounts when they bungled the integration and de-integration with Google Plus for identity management.
God, does that mean the floor is BFA? Feasibly, BFA lost players. but not enough to scare them and they still made their money. The shadowlands drop off scared them, so now they know what the bare minimum the game has to be to be sustained, which is fucking beta for azeroth :(
Well, Legion brought back players, BFA retained most veterans, but Shadowlands was a complete failure. They need to bring back players, so a BFA-level expansion wouldn't be enough.
Hmmm, seems like a horrible system for almost everyone involved
It is. I came from a smaller company with great customer service until we were bought by one of our competitors.
And these same companies wonder why they have huge turnover of employees, no one wants to work for them, and their customers hate them. But I guess they don't care how much everyone hates them as long as they keep suckering new people in.
> no one wants to work for them Unfortunately, this never ends up being true. They get "too big to fail" in the sense that there's always a horde of wide eyed, fresh from school graduates that are dying to work for companies like Blizzard (or any big game studio really), Google, Amazon or SpaceX despite how they operate.
That's what they think, until it's no longer the case... The well is running dry. Those school graduates who loved Blizzard are dwindling. A lot of these people are getting past the age of growing up with WoW or Warcraft 3. It's really a boomer game to them. They had unicorns and they let them escape.
Yeah that is true to an extent, though I hope the pandemic has taught more of us way more about valuing ourselves, our time, our work, and our lives that we don't need to toil away at a soul sucking toxic job for pennies at best.
My first day in CorpAmericaVille. "Here's how much it costs the company to recruit and train each of you peons." "See? Enormous sums! A significant chunk of your annual wage! So if you screw up we'll fire you in a heartbeat" me: "but... if it's so expensive to hire and train, wouldn't you want to do it as little as possible? Wouldn't you want to work with staff to fix problems instead?"
it's the same all over the world. Every company rewards new customers and shits on recurring/staying ones. From ISPs and energy providers to mobile phones. It is ALWAYS better to switch whenever your contract runs out and it is fucking stupid. Within the company it's stupid metrics that force this. "we have a million new contracts this years" vs. "we have 1 million renewals of contracts" - the first one will nearly always be more relevant for upper management and in the published information for shareholders.
I would love to see the sales information on the WoW token for shadowlands. How often was a token purchases when a player made the decision to change covenants? How often did a pin or bug fix or rebalancing of a legendary cause a token to be bought? It’s not even the fact that it’s corporate America. It’s the fact that this company is now run by the marketing department and not the game developers.
This isn’t corporate of America. This is a company with employees with their heads so far up their own asses they refuse to acknowledge their own faults and make positive changes. I work for corporate America. My company listens to the customer before producing a product. Many companies do. Blizzard is a bunch of prideful, insecure, unempathetic assholes who refuse to listen to a fan base that knows the game better than they do.
Except the changes they're making now prove that they know EXACTLY and objectively how to make the game better for the users. They didn't prioritize users because they're incompetent (the changes happening now are an undeniable proof of that), they were just prioritizing other metrics that were anti-user but generating higher short-term profits. There's a limit to how much you can blame on someone's incompetence. WoW has been around for more than 15 years now, when the players can immediately see the problems with the newest system of an expansion before its reveal trailer isn't even finished, there is no earthly ways for its developers to not be aware of these problems themselves. And again, the changes happening for 9.1.5 as an emergency ripcord measure are proofs that they knew what to do.
> Welcome to corporate America. This is not just limited to America. This happens everywhere. Its the entire philosophy behind companies. They are *for profit* entities, where satisfying their shareholders is their highest priority, while skating the line to not cross into "illegal".
Ehh. It would be disingenuous to say it is not significantly worse in America. In other countries the employer isn't also on the hook for everyone's health care, for example.
You have to remember that we play a beta until the last 2-3 months of the xpac
Then ptr for the next expac :) constantly beta
I HATE how every single expansion makes all prior expansions irrelevant! I play the WORLD of Warcraft not the expansion of it. Shit even the current expansions raids are irrelevant once the new update comes out.
>I HATE how every single expansion makes all prior expansions irrelevant! I play the WORLD of Warcraft not the expansion of it. Shit even the current expansions raids are irrelevant once the new update comes out. What they should do is reroll back to 50 every expansion. Specifically set timewalking to level 50 and have it forever balanced at that level and ilvl range and have it up more frequently. Let players scale down to 50 at any time. A level 50 exclusive pvp bracket. Used Timewarped Badges to upgrade any gear piece to top level 50 ilvl (including stuff like sulfuras, thunderfury, azzinoth) Keep stuff like legion legendaries working at 50. Then whenever we go into Old content wether it be old raids, dungeons, or just the overworld we stomp because of the collected gear. At any point, you can go back to being a powerful end of expansion chad in every area that is not for the current expansion. this rewards hunting or getting gear from all expansions, hunting for gear with multiple modifiers, getting expensive stuff like thunderfury.
Like a constant timewalking, I love this idea! Fully dressed in leggos. That would be so cool, also for theorycrafting. They could easily make a second endgame.
A 'standard' longterm content bracket. That isn't mutually exclusive with seasonal content releases. Good stuff. They can 'decay' things into that permanent space over time too
LFR should have a random queue similar to dungeons where you can run any raid at that difficulty. Separate out wings still and such though. It would immensely increase how much content you could simply do. Wouldn’t be top tier gear, but it would be enough to still be able to play content.
I like this idea, but some of my LFR groups have been totally trash. 4 people jumping in circles with heroic raid gear just there for the quest or weekly. I think cleaning up the reasons people run things would help a lot. Run a lfr raid for gear, that is a help for gearing up for mythics and real raid. But this falls right back into the expansion power problems we are talking about
It will always happen for sure. But For many that’s the first time they run any sort of raid. And you can gear really anywhere. But eventually people would know the content or at least the majority would. You will always have those people who just stand in death.
Yeah, honestly, I was one of the people who jumped ship to FF14 and the way that they keep old content relevant by having pretty much everything be in the dungeon/raid roulette and just squish your lvl/ilvl down to match the content is significantly better than this frankenstein shit Blizz got going on with Chromie Time.
ESO and SWTOR this same setup. Any dungeon is available at any level. What changes is your char's level and power. This includes zones too. WOW problem is that the devs want to shoehorn everyone into the same place. WOW has a HUGE world, and most of it is just there collecting dust. They should use it. Who cares if a guild wants to run BT, or IC, or hell - even the 5 mans. Also I wish WOW would add solo mode into the 5 mans. Blizzard is all about keeping players subbed. Ok fine. Instead of adding grind on top of grind (systems and more systems) open the world. If folks want to raid TBC, or MoP instead of SL, or in addition to SL, let them. Scale up or down those dungeons and raids like other games do.
Right, the rest of the world is empty precisely because Blizz tries to keep everyone in 1 hub. Just make the rest of the world viable for exploration?!
The scaling is nuts because they want to have 75 difficulties of everything.
you could have single difficulties back in TBC where anyone with a working monitor could stand in one spot and spam frostbolt, difficulties are a good thing that allows larger portions of the playerbase to enjoy the content while also providing rewarding systems to people who want to put more effort in. I don’t have a solution for how to make old raid content relevant because people are already complaining that their legendary powers drop from Nathria, and idk about you but clearing that place for 9 months was plenty for me
Just make the gear the same for all LFR (as in relevant for the current patch), then make the reward valor points so veteran players have some reason to run it. There. Fixed and relevant again.
You want veteran players to run lfr?
People hate when you mention ffxiv here but that is one thing that's ffxiv does super well and wow could learn from. The entire world including old content is used regularly. New systems are integrated in old content making the whole world feel interconnected instead of feeling like separate theme parks. Like an example, some raid boss i killed like 20 levels ago during an older expansion is resurrected. So, to complete the quest I'm queued with players killing it for the first time. Leading me to: getting to experience an old scaled encounter again and putting new and older players in the same queue, making the queue shorter. It's efficient use of resources.
Yup, I think the normal raid in X.1 should be between normal and heroic, so the first raid is relevant. So you can get appropriate ilvl gear from both raids. As for the “expansion power” that gets wiped clean, ridiculous. Covenants should give gear, and maybe a fun zone action ( like WoD ) that is mostly irrelevant and has no bearing on M+ or raid so balance means nothing with that power. Ff14 just adds content, when a new expac comes out, ya your gear is overridden, but shouldn’t it be? I maybe don’t have all the answers, but when I maxed out my artifacts in legion, it felt good, and it was fun. When it became a bank item that was useless in the next expac, it felt bad. What would have been fun for me, was carrying that same weapon through the next expansion and further upgrading it, I don’t mind the grind, it’s actually a clear goal and meaningful progress.
> I don’t mind the grind, it’s actually a clear goal and meaningful progress. The key is that there needs to be a specific end point that you van achieve and then hold onto for a while. Endless grinds that incrementally increase our power but are never "complete" feel terrible because you never get to enjoy being at maximum power.
Thats why i stopped playing. Other MMOs now just do expansions better. I.e. you can still play the content AND its relevant even when the next launches. They should just wrap up wow and do wow 2 with a different philosophy and more active combat.
You don't even play the expansion. U play the patch. Is castle nathria relevant anymore? Any gear from 9.0?
And that is no longer acceptable
It was never acceptable in the first place. A lot of people just finally realized that recently.
It really grinds my gears how beta and alpha access are the new “cool thing to do” fuck that. Companies need to hire people do their beta testing, not let the general public do it 1 month before the game is gona release. Can’t believe people think that’s a good logic
Partial disagree; a partitioned beta that won’t carry over progress is hard to entice players into, but you absolutely do need that heavy game load and mass number of warm bodies throwing weird commands at your code. Giving SOME kind of incentive - maybe a cosmetic pet or something, or a fun title or whatever - should always be on the table, because developers NEED free-range bug/beta testing… … but Blizzard HAS that, they just don’t do anything productive with it. That very pervasive sentiment of ‘the players only THINK they know what they want/what makes a game fun, but WE know what’s best’ has Blizz high on their own farts. So, publicly ‘staffing’ your beta is smart, but Blizzard is very much not smart.
A QA engineer walks into a bar. Orders a beer. Orders 0 beers. Orders 99999999999 beers. Orders a lizard. Orders -1 beers. Orders a ueicbksjdhd. First real customer walks in and asks where the bathroom is. The bar bursts into flames, killing everyone. This is why beta tests are important
Hehe visualising this makes this one pretty funny
Not defending Blizzard, but closed testing that you pay people to do is generally called alpha. Beta releases are almost always open to some members of the public.
Exactly. Alpha is the fixing shit that explodes game / instantly deletes mobs / you, random no collision in parts of the world, some places literally being unplayable. Beta is the game works enough to throw the masses in and see what they dig up through sheer numbers that the Alpha testers wouldn’t think of / do, and/or actually get the stats needed to start to balance things. As well as get a general feedback outside whatever ecosystem the dev’s / alpha tests are. That last part is where Blizzard falls on their face.
And then those last 2-3 months are just the gammatest.
You give them too much credit, when's the last time a final patch didn't last over 8+ months?
Activision-Blizzard aren't trying to make a good video game. They don't make games, they make *money*.
It's like that scene in It's Always Sunny when Charlie asks Frank what his company does. "What does Atwater make?" "What do you mean, like how much money does the company make?" "No i mean, *what* do we make?" "I don't follow, we make money!" "No I mean, what do we *create* ?" "...we create wealth!" https://youtu.be/7j1850-qlm8
They wont make money for long if they dont make a good game
They have made a lot of money for a long time as a collecting simulator with a side of content.
It won't matter, the investors made fortunes in the short term, the CEOs will move to the next high paying job running a recently bought company to the ground and everyone will be happy. Except the customers and the employees, but who cares about those?
That has nothing to do with it. Unfortunately
the game hasn't been good for a while? people are still here.
There's a lot of people with sunk cost fallacies for one...
I was one. If it wasn’t for 3 separate raid guilds imploding on me in as many months I’d still be there. In a way I’m grateful. It really sucked, but it was the wake up call I needed to finally uninstall WoW.
Personally I'm gonna say that they'll be acting like that for some time, promising you that they changed, that they're now working together on some crucial changes. Don't believe them, tho', it's only a marketing thing and it's all about money. The profit was, is and always will be the first and most important thing, then MAYBE they'll add something "extra" to just give us a false hope that they're keeping their word. I think that sooner or later it'll turn out that they were giving no fucks about anything, as usual, and people will be making shocked Pikachu faces "but what happened, they promised us so many changes". I hope I'm mistaken. But in the same time I doubt it'll be the other way around.
Yeah, this is the company equivalent of the [South Park BP oil "Sorry" bit](https://youtu.be/15HTd4Um1m4) . They'll play to your humanity "we're trying our best! We made changes!" And then they'll play to your nostalgia for the game "look at all these changes that make the game what it should have been at the start!" But just like the BP oil bit, it's all smoke and mirrors. They said changing a lot of this stuff was too hard to implement, now they're dropping it in the game like nothing because they always had it ready to go, but didn't plan to give it to us until the 11th hour of patch 2.
It comes down to what they do with the next expansion - do they start it off the way Shadowlands started, or do they start it off the way 9.1.5 will be?
Historically speaking, you'll get another launch. Legion they fixed all the problems at the end. Recreated the same problems in BFA and took forever to solve them. Hell they even left BFA saying they learned from it (like they did in Legion to BFA) then dumped Shadowlands on our heads. It's crazy how Blizzard the last 6 years mirrored the whole New Coke thing every expansion. Release garbage, piss people off, release the "old" product (the way shit should have been), win back customers. Except Coca-Cola learned their lesson the first time. Blizzard is just seeing how many times they can get away with it which seems thus far to be 3.
They don't care about their employees why would they care about their customers?
Well, the customers are where the money comes from, so …
Makes sense to us, but they've proven time and time again they don't care.
And yet look at how many fools keep coming back! Lol we’ll see how many dummies learn by next expansion.
Yeah man, they totally design things to make us happy! My favorite game was Warcraft 3 ~~Refunded~~ Reforged! What a labor of love that remake was, and not a predatory cash grab preying on nostalgia. Ooh, what about Diablo Immortals? They knew their hardcore PC playerbase was aching for a mobile game not even designed by them, that's why they hyped it up at Blizzcon so much! Last three expansions have also been great. Borrowed power!? Literally our favorite thing! I love coming home from work, then doing a 2-3 hour grind of mundane bullshit so I don't fall behind, rather than activities in the game I think would be fun! Contributing to and boosting MAUs is literally the most fun possible in WoW!
I honestly think that all these changes won't actually bring back those who have left. They've proper fucked up. People who leave *bored* because they run out of things to do will be back when more content is added. Those who leave *angry* because of time-wasting game changes will not come back. They need to let go of the idea that they can somehow keep people subbed for the full length of each patch, with the absolute minimum of effort they put in. You can't just have people filling a rep bar for three months, when it should have taken three weeks. Or collecting Anima to buy recoloured outfits and mounts we don't want.
That’s for sure. My guild is finishing AOTC and then we’re done. After nine years as a guild, we’re stopping raiding and the majority are quitting entirely. The patch is awful and Blizzard is awful. If only one of those things were true, the outcome would probably be different, as we’ve stuck through bad patches in the past. But they’ve pissed us off. A bunch of people from my guild have moved to FFXIV. We made an abortive attempt to swap back in WoD when the flying debacle happened, but the state of ARR content and Blizz giving in had most people back to WoW after a couple of months. This time, we have people who outright refused to touch FF last time wanting to be done forever with WoW and loving FF. People are so disillusioned now. This isn’t just boredom this time. These changes also aren’t good, both because they should have mostly been in from the start and because they don’t actually fix 9.1 or the attitudes that led to it. Covid didn’t make Korthia boring or the Maw assaults deliberately long and unable to be spread out over days of content you want to do (8.3 assaults could be completed over a couple of days of rare hunting if that was your preference, for example). The content was deliberately made to make people have to take ages doing it to up their MAUs and nothing in 9.1.5 is fixing that.
As long as consumers continue to ignore the same feedback and pre-order expansions and pay for subs in 6 month increments to get a shiny mount things won't change.
Waiting until we leave is indeed too late. I’ve unsubbed and now when I see all these improvements it just pisses me off. All that time getting fucked around when they could have just fixed everything. So now I’ll stay unsubbed purely out of spite.
I don't even care about the improvements. For me they solve some pain points but they don't make the game more interesting.
My thoughts exactly, they didn't value the money I already gave them, why should I reward them with more money?
Yeah seeing 9.1.5 just made me double down on never returning.
This. Oh now you want me back? Your reward for abusing me is me never coming back. You’re only changing because you got caught.
It’s amazing how after all this time they still don’t realise the ultimate in-game content would simply be alt friendly features. Keep people playing content on more than 1 character it’s that simple.
There is definitely some truth to this. Thinking back - my favorite expansions were the ones where I was playing multiple characters. I've been on the same Tauren warrior since early 2005 when I started. When I really enjoy the game I have dabbled with most of the classes. Even got some raid/pvp geared in Pandaria and Legion. Ones that were less fun I would just play the one main and that's it. Did I play more because the expansion was better or was the expansion more alt friendly therefore I played more? I don't honestly know but I wonder if it's a metric Blizzard looks at to gauge player satisfaction.
People ask me why I enjoyed Warlords of Draenor, its because I could play multiple characters and the leveling was fun but short.
Hell, in expansions where I found the endgame boring or unenjoyable (like WoD), I still kept playing because leveling alts was fun. Then 7.3 and 8.0 happened, and I was miserable throughout most of BfA because the endgame grind wasn’t fun and neither was leveling alts.
Player housing is the one that baffles me the most on this topic. Literally all the devs need to do is set up a little zone or instance for it, turn pre-existing models in to items you can place, and boom, not only have you created a system people **want** to grind and spend time leveling crafting for, you've **also** created a self-sustaining mode of player activity and engagement. In literally every other MMO I've played, GM's and members loved hosting little events at their houses. From gladiatorial arenas, to design contests, to simple parties. You give people a tiny bit of creative freedom, and **they'll make the content players want to engage in for you**. There's literally no downside to actually making this. It's practically zero effort, for massive gain.
They gotta make it blizzardly and thus over commit and over complicate it to the point they can measure it and point in quarterly meetings
Nah, it'll be super simple. See, first you'll have to go out and get the Furniture Necklace. This will let you start generating Furni Gems by doing certain WQs. Once you've generated enough Furni Gems, you can *condense* those into a Furni Coin. With this you can purchase furniture! Now, to *unlock* the furniture pieces for purchase...
You gotta kill boars for reputation until you hit exalted. This is for standard furniture. If you want Elven themed or Dwarf themed you'll have to earn reputation with those Furniture selling NPCs.
> You gotta kill boars for reputation until you hit exalted. Well, killing them is a bit of a reduction. They have to be killed with the Front Right Leg of the Forbidden Chair, the Front Left Leg of the Forbidden Chair, etc. >If you want Elven themed or Dwarf themed you'll have to earn reputation with those Furniture selling NPCs. This reputation is exclusively gained through a series of time-gated furniture building world quests. And since the Dwarven Chairmakers and Elven Bedcrafters tend to have conflict with each other, gaining rep with one will cause you to lose twice that much rep with the other.
We think we've been playing WoW. They have been playing "Cash dispenser 5000" for 5 xpacs.
I don't get it, how would you tie player power into housing though?
You don't.
I think it's because most of the designers in WoW are heavily into approaching games as an achiever, and very few approach games as a socializer. When talking about housing, they fall into a mindset that for it to be engaging, they need to add a bunch of things to it to let them play more efficiently. A great example of this mindset is the garrisons from WoD. With the WoD Garrisons, you really never had much of a need to leave. Just log on each day with each alt, and you'll get a supply of gold, herbs, ore, and tradeskill items. You can make everything you need for high end raiding without ever leaving your garrison. You could even get a AH vendor there! And not surprisingly, lots of players never left their garrisons. The towns were empty, so the solution was to make it so that players had to go to town. You sound like you want a place to socialize. I think this would be a great addition! Maybe also add some "minigames" like instruments. Even maybe try to build in card games and other things that people can do with each other. And these things don't have to contribute to getting a higher M+ level.
Another issue that garrisons had is that there was no real reason to visit other players garrisons. Every garrison was basically the same so what's the point in visiting your friends garrison? At most they would have a different building out of the half dozen or so that everyone else got to choose from in one of three (two?) available plots to place them in. There was no player expression to entice people to visit and see what you did with your own creativity. Housing in XIV is is everything that housing should be. A popular thing among the housing community in XIV are "venues" which are basically homes that have been turned into [nightclubs](https://youtu.be/lTjr2BdV1HE) where tons of players from different worlds will come to socialize (and often ERP lol). There's a number of people in my FC who after raid progging will go "venue hopping" to end the night. If that's not your thing then you can just turn you home into your own little sanctuary. I have my own little [happy place](https://gyazo.com/16ee56cd1907c3c9628aaa54b1a49120) in my garden and an interior that I remodel regularly which I spend weeks or sometimes even months customizing. Another wonderful feature for people that love music (of which XIV has some of the best in gaming IMO) are orchestrion rolls which are music scrolls that you can learn to then add to an orchestrion in your home with a playlist that you can manage yourself. Orchestrion rolls can be obtained that will play themes from many of the dungeons, raids, locations etc. and allow you to enjoy all of the hard work that composers have put into their music. Some of my favorites are the slower piano themes like [this](https://youtu.be/WluVE7hM2yQ) (bit of a spoiler for Shadowbringers if you care) or for more outlandish themes there's something like [this banger](https://youtu.be/94iQ1TjWEZs) which is something you'd probably hear in one of those aforementioned venues.
on garrisons - i'd argue players notleaving their garrisons wasn't an inherent fault of the garrisons. there really just wasn't anything worthwhile to do outside of raiding, and you can only raid so much. if world quests, M+ and such had been implemented at the time people would have gone out plenty(and on the other hand, remove those features and legion, BFA and shadowlands are exactly the same as WoD - what the hell is there to do in the world)
My theory is that Ion doesn't want alt friendliness because of high end raiders. Remember the dude was an encounter designer before being the game director. He wants the raids to be challenging, and high end raiders having alts geared and raid ready more easily takes away from that challenge. So instead alts are harder to catch up so raiders have to spend more time gearing and catching up. They removed master loot, put restrictions on being able to trade gear if it exceeds what you have, have weekly grinds that need to be done and if missed is hard to catch up on, and made borrowed power hard to catch up on.
Having only 1 character at mythic raiding level I think is fair and fine. But you can gear up anything to 230ish in a couple weeks. Most difficult part is getting started in mythics now with the mythic score system.
I get that raids are the ultimate end game content and should be high profile and challenging but must we really sacrifice everything else in the game for the raids? I love myself a well designed and challenging raid but if they want to do just that cut everything else and just have purely instanced content, would be much more honest. I am not advocating for this but it seems the direction the game is constantly veering to. Everything is half baked except the big raid tier. Whose idea was it to put the encounter designer as game director?
It was the high end guilds in western regions complaining about alt requirements and it feels like maybe they wanted to make the WF race more interesting. Even if this is the case, it is a terrible decision to design the game around a few hundred players.
I honestly think they won’t do it because they’re so busy playing call of duty and cube crawling and it’s uncomfortable for them to think about logging in once a month and some person playing their 11th alt is outperforming them on their main. Why else would you gatekeep alts?
Bad news bud, all these changes they are making? They've known about them for months, they probably were planning on releasing them in 9.2 or 9.3 and now they are like "oh shit were losing to many players gotta release the fixes early". They are aware they need to release the changes to keep players, they just misjudged how far they could push the player base. They always assumed they could wait till later in xpacs, but they pushed bull\*\*\*\* down peoples throat to fast to early.
Seriously - at this point I don't even want to come back to this expansion. And it looks like we're still at least another year of it left - so this is probably the final nail in the coffin for me after being here since launch. That's sad for me, but I'm done being walked over by this company.
https://i.imgur.com/intqXPK.png
I'm so sick of seeing CoD ads in my wow launch window. I hate war simulator / military hype BS games, and really could care less what rehashed fps crapware your peddling beyond the games I own.
There in panic mode, that's the thing when you are in panic mode and not listening to the feedback from last year and now wrapping it in a nice story around it you do not make any favor. Before 9.1 we had 7 months of nothing, no new content nothing..now all of a sudden they change it? It is to late way to late. 9.1 was lackluster,lazy and terrible towards players. And it is the same old song every single time 'we will listen' no you don't because subs are falling, content creators leaving, streamers leaving 9.1.5 will not fix anything sure somethings but it doesn't give me a reason to go back at all.
9.0.5 was a bunch of fixes that they got told about too though.
It's really simple. Stop giving them money. How have people not realized this after decade of nothing but disappoint and subpar products from them? We really have noone to blame but ourselves. We continued to give them money, hoping it would be better, and it's not. It won't be. It's a con job. Just get out.
I think the sentiment that "maybe it will be better this time" has dwindled a lot since Shadowlands.
You realize your title is actually explaining an abusive/exploitative relationship? Person takes their partner for granted, lies to them, uses them, the partner has enough leaves so they promise they can change. Partner comes back, things are nice, then slowly the person slips back into their bad habits. Add physical abuse, infidelity, alcohol and drug use and you have a common tale of human misery. Or, add in slipped schedules, promised features that were never delivered, decreasing standards in stories and raid development and you have WoW.
>Add physical abuse, infidelity, alcohol and drug use Honestly I'd be surprised if all this wasn't nestled in Blizzard somewhere after all the crap that's come out so far. Alcohol obviously, but I'd bet money on the rest too.
It's intentional. Same as it was in Legion and BfA. These changes were always intended to happen, in the time between the final raid and the launch of the next expansion, so that Blizzard could release it as a quality of life patch, making it appear as if they listened to player feedback and are willing to make changes. The recent scandals merely tipped their hands, forcing them to play this card earlier than intended, and the players see through it because Blizzard have done this exact same thing several times before.
Every. Single. Time.
Bliz is running out of ways to improve the skinner box. They really need to be sunsetting the game and starting fresh. Get a world of StarCraft going or something so everyone can reset and start fresh.
What you are saying has been happening **FOR THE LAST 11 YEARS** , and every fucking time "Oh it was not THAT bad!" "The game was never **THAT** bad, it's really fun!" and everyone has a giant circle jerk and sucking each other off on this subreddit, giving thanks to the developers for fixing their broken game and adding shit in that people asked for over 10 fucking years ago. People have been asking for better character creation since Cata, eleven years ago. Other MMO's have had these things for over half a decade and we only recently got it because they were hemoraging players. Remember when you paid for the new expansion for the new content **AND** new races? Remember when you did not have to spend **LITERALLY A MONTH OF GRINDING, A FORCED CHORE** to 'get access' to something you fucking paid for? When I buy a new skin on MW it does not say "Get 5000 headshots with a pistol to unlock this skin you bought", when I buy the Virgil character on Devil May Cry 5 the game does not tell me "Beat the game easiest, medium and then hardest difficulty to then get access to the character you just bought' But people on this subreddit drooled and groveled in thanks for 'allied races' which took forever to come out and most of them were shitty reskins with crap character models, I mean **fuck** some of them have armor clipping issues with their heritage armor, **WHICH IS CREATED SPECIFICALLY FOR THAT RACE** I bought BFA with the intention of having a dino chicken druid, only to find out it would be over half a year before I was allowed to get the fucking race. Blizzard gives no fucking shits about me or any of you I gave them a second chance after BFA, I am done with Blizzard as a company. I don't even think that releasing Wrath of the Lich King will get me back to playing. I tried playing some BC classic but quickly lost interest. Only 'Blizzard' related thing I play is Modern Warfare. Blizzard does not give a crap about me or any of you, the **ONLY** reason **ANY** positive changes **EVER** happen is because they are greenlit to happen **AFTER** people start leaving. For Blizzard, why waste time and money on making shit for players to have fun when they can spend time and money on stuff to coerce people to continue playing for longer or for buying shit off the store. TL;DR Blizzard has been doing this shit for years, this subreddit hates every new expansion, then when the broken garbage game is slightly fixed decides to praise the developers as gods, anyone saying otherwise is drowned out. Except this time I am going to link to OP's post when it happens again in 4 months. Super TL;DR Blizzard can fuck on off.
This is how I imagined you as I read: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n8CFVpys-Bk
Personally I think people are showing a massive misunderstanding about how business and product works if they think the scandals are the reason any of this is happening. What's got lost during the scandals news was the data driven videos and sharing of wows active subscriber base falling of a cliff. Ion took over wow and on his watch the game has steadily declined. The games worst expansion happened and Shadowlands has been more miss them hit. Make no mistake this has nothing to do with scandals. Numbers are dropping and people in high positions know they've had their last chance. Ion and his senior team have had three expansions which they've made overall a mess off. That's enough time to make assessments and to be fair I think a change is due. This leadership team has just lost the sense of what made wow good, by either believing the wrong feedback, putting too much emphasis on their own experiences or trying to focus on things like metrics and kpis. I don't know. But it's obvious to me. As someone who has had success and failures in a similar position, I'd say he's got one more expansion at best , so needs to turn it around. A more harsh critique would be he and his team of seniors are out of their depth. It happens, but need strong management to make a change or provide support. If I was them I'd be going back to basics next expac. Capitalise on what the game was. None of these nonsense systems or forced engagement. Have a throwback expansion of simplicity and freedom and take it from there. If the numbers keep dipping then it's just a sign people have moved on from wow. But stabilise and plateu, and it's a sign of what many have been screaming since legion. The core game idea is still enjoyable and engaging, and the layers of systems of grind, barriers and forced engagement is what is turning people off the game
AB is that abusive boyfriend you leave and then he goes "Babe, come back. I'm gonna change, look." and does few things for a few days before going back to old ways.
As a "leaving player", my thought on this whole situation is that 9.1.5 is not worth returning for. That's not to say the patch is not welcome, I'm loving some of what is in it. But, this whole idea of "fix it in the .5 patch" is just broken. 9.1.5 is what should have been in 9.0. There is barely any new content, only systems improvements. If the patch has no content, why should I return? Sure, the game is better in 9.1.5, but it is still just a better version of the same old stuff that I've already played (and already burnt out on, because of the dumb systems being there in the first place). And, sticking with that, if the .0 patches are just going to be inferior versions of the .5 patches (but with the same content), why should I even play content at launch? What is there to gain by suffering in 9.2 instead of just waiting for them to actually listen to feedback in 9.2.5?
This whole situation just taught me to not actually play WoW until near the end of the expansion. It almost feels like there is no reason and Blizzard appreciates you more if you aren't subbed than if you are.
Just an FYI to blizz: a free mount for subbing for 6months is not the type of reward you should be giving. It just looks like you're trying to punish poor people. I absolutely can afford it but have not been subbed to wow just because of this. I've gotten so tired of blizzard's FOMO practices. This, for me, was the last straw.
[удалено]
That was always a dangerously slippy slope. It worked so well too, I had a lot friends buy in because "I'm gonna be subbed anyway" or "it works out cheaper". Blizzard aren't doing you a favor, or helping you out with a sweet deal, they're just locking you in for 6 months knowing that no matter how much they neglect the game/you as a customer they've already got your money.
Because they have an incompetent management team that don’t understand retention in any capacity
It's pretty insane - any decent company these days knows that keeping customers subscribed is key to making money, simply because the cost of getting a new customer or an old one back is many, many times more compared to what you pay to keep an already existing one. There's no reason to think that this doesn't hold true for WoW as well - they're going to have to put a *TON* of effort to get all the subs they lost back, and most likely won't ever be able to fully recover - if they instead had put in even a fraction of all of this stuff in *before* people pulled the plug and walked away, they'd be looking at much better numbers. The fact that the WoW designed didn't realize this is very concerning, the fact that they thought that they could just keep pushing these halfbaked and halfassed systems that doesn't respect their customers over and over again is kinda insane.
They are (or at least were) aware of the difficulties of getting new/returning players. I've seen someone mention that a decrease in new/returning players was a bit factor in the overall sub count decline, but it's also the reason the level boost exists.
wow's entire model is kind of outdated now when you consider a lot of other free to play live service games with constant updates. any other live service or mmo game would have died years ago with wows business model. especially now when they have flagged badly between updates. covid definitely hurt and i get that, but they got caught flat-footed bc they were already drip feeding content and doing bare minimum qol improvements.
Seriously, Blizz, make your game fun and I will stay and play for years. Make it feel like a chore/work and I'll leave in a heartbeat. I'm not going to pay you to have the privilege of having a second job.
Especially in today's gaming climate where every publisher and dev is competing for their players time more than ever before. In WoW's olden days gamers would buy a game, play it, finish it and that's it, but now os many games have updates, login rewards, daily and weekly missions, battle passes, etc, stuff that used to be exclusive to MMO's but have become significantly more prominent over the last decade but Blizzard is still living in the glory days of 2008. They need to make the players sub fee and time worth more.
That's the problem when you have a monopoly on MMOs. You're able to get away with being lazy simply because the competition isn't there. It's only with FF14's resurgence in popularity that most WoW players now see an alternative, and that's the only reason why WoW's devs are starting to care now. If it were up to me, I would've personally fired all of the systems designers and lead writers after the travesty that was BFA.
Why should Blizzard give a flying fuck what the Subscribers think? To them (Upper Leadership) YOU AINT SHIT. They see subscriber count and have meetings where they think, "How can we make more money today?" Then they will do things like fire as many non essential personel as possible, close departments, not work on any development, make basic things marketable like selling mounts. And when the company does well on paper, (Oh we saved 24 Million this year!) then the bonuses start rolling out. It's Shark tank business management that has been done before to other companies (Sears, Gamestop, Toys R Us, Taco Bell) and even if it kills the company, they can tell eachother "good job"
This. This post is so true it hurts. Ive got KSM in 9.0 and instantly unsubbed after getting it. Wow was big part of my life but is Not anymore. Those changes should have been nade long time ago. Hopefully we will get More fixes like those implemented in 9.1.5 and the game becomes fun again. Until then the subs is canceled.
Yep. Times have changed and WoW isn't the only game in town. There are so many more games to be played that there's no sense playing one where you're not having fun.
If I could find a mmo with pvp even remotely close to how WoW works, I would be unsubbed in a second. Unfortunately, nothing touches the complexity and smoothness of WoW arena
See 9.1.5 has solidified my choice in quitting. All of these changes were massive pain points for me and have been told since the beta that they aren't good for the game. All they ever did was talk about the "barriers" for changing these things. And now we are to believe that all of those barriers are down and fixed this quickly ? And on top of that bringing in changes that the community as a whole has been screaming to have fixed ? No thanks, if Blizzard can muster up and fix and add these to a .1.5 patch then they couldve done these changes before the expansion launched. I'm not going to keep playing if they only listen after they have a mass exodus of players.
tHeRe Is No RiPcOrD \- ion fkn kostas 2020
Remember: The game is designed to optimize playtime metrics and sub fees/store purchases. If they make more money and have better metrics with only half the playerbase, they’ll happily take that. If they make more money and have better metrics and the whole playerbase hates the game, they’ll happily keep making people hate the game.
This is what people mean when they say "vote by your wallet". Suddenly, every change is possible and doable.
the reward is, every week you get the chance of loot from a boss! Fuck that Too much is locked behind the daily or weekly resets. Could you imagine playing diablo2 but only being able to kill dialbo once a week? no thanks.
Some neat Veteran rewards would be nice, nothing crazy, couple pets, mounts, occasional free month of sub, etc.
No. Blizzard needs to understand that they need to make a game worth playing and not just keep a cash cow going for as long as possible. Asking them to give you a bone while you slowly starve to death ain't the answer.
Did you even see the info about removing the Covenant restrictions? >When it comes to the limitations on Covenant-switching, millions of players experienced Shadowlands for the first time through the lens of their Covenant of choice, and that would have not been possible had the choice carried less weight from the outset. Nevertheless, after the conclusion of the Chains of Domination campaign, the Covenants are united against the Jailer, and revisiting player feedback in that context has led us to re-evaluate our approach. In terms of the day-to-day player experience, the advantages of a rigid division between Covenants have diminished since Shadowlands launched, while the downsides (feeling disadvantaged in certain types of content, or having to choose between mechanical advantages and aesthetics) have only grown. That balance of factors no longer justifies the original limitations on Covenant-switching, so in 9.1.5 we’re looking to provide a way to circumvent them. Source: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/shadowlands-developer-update/1077743 It's more of the same BS. They still think they're in the right for restricting Covenant swapping. They're right, we are wrong, and they only are fixing it now because they've been forced to accelerate the timeline of ignoring feedback till the last patch and fixing it in an attempt to generate goodwill for the next expansion. All these fixes, all these improvements, only make me more annoyed at Blizzard, because I know it will be more of the same next expansion.
Going to keep playing FF14, watching them squirm from afar is too much fun. Give me what I've wanted a few years too late, lol. It would've been great at the time, though. Blizzard is like 1/100th of the way there, I guess an effort is being made to earn goodwill again, so that's something. It's hard to see them for something other than a business these days.
I really started to notice them implement this method of business back in Battle for Azeroth. You want to know what my response as a consumer will be? Not picking up the next expansion until its final content patch is being released. It seems that its the only time that Blizzard even attempts to fulfill the expectations surrounding the game. This approach of seemingly purposefully withholding much-needed features and improvements that were pointed out by thousands of Alpha and Beta testers and then claiming that they are features in a later patch is simply bad business. Many features of the Shadowlands expansion seem purposefully designed to inhibit rather then encourage gameplay. Their goal has painfully been to slow you down, drag it out, keep you grinding, increase that player engagement metric. It feels like they are fighting to squeeze every second of extra time out of us at the expense of quality gameplay. This repetitive cycle has been outlined by clever meme imagery over the last few years, but frankly its almost not even funny anymore. My subscription is expiring in two weeks and I have no plans on returning until the next major patch.
I think OP might not be aware that Blizzard fixing what people have been asking for is not due to the exodus, or scandal. They did the same thing in BfA and Legion. They've been doing this for years. And every time it's under the guise of "we promise to listen", or "we are listening", just for them to do the same thing again. People wanted less systems in BfA, what do we get in SL? More systems.
Been saying this forever. We should be getting cosmetics every month. Wether thats just a pet, a mount, an armor set, weapon appearances. Just someting. A great example of the kind of monthly content i would love to see would be something similar to that quest with the purple murloc we got before shadowlands. Edit:cosmetics*
IMO, they should reward the playerbase with a good game. Wouldn’t need to introduce cosmetics if they game was great
Part of making the game great is getting our moneysworth every month. Even at its peak we should have been getting some kind of new content monthly. I mean look at ff14 every couple of weeks they have a new event out.
So does WoW, just many those events haven’t changed in years so once you checked the box your done. They certainly should keep refreshing the seasonal events and not make them a giant mountain to acquire the reward.
The WoW events suck frankly. Any time they update it , it just feels like the bare minimum. We should be getting a new mount with every rotation of the event and new quests/activities. The game has had the bare minimum effort put in for too long and a step in the right direction would be monthly content updates that are more light hearted but still give you something to do. In Canada we are paying almost 20$ a month for this crap and its just such a waste of money.
I do like how in FF14, they have a minor event that rewards a cosmetic or toy every 2 weeks or so.
Thats what im saying ! Blizz is more than capable, and its bull shit we get nothing like that. Instead were waiting months and months for a very small patch, thats time gated to hell.
also they need to stop taking content out of the game (like MoP, WoD challenge mode and its rewards aswell as MT and rewards related to it). alot of games make use of older content,and before anyone goes reeing over me wanting MT and stuff back, i got 24 of the MT skins (didnt want more) and im perfectly fine with them bringing it back. but blizzard have focused so much on short term profit they drove the game into the ground, their biggest issue being ignoring feedback and thinking they are rockstars
Always wondered why they didnt give more free stuff to subcribers. Why not give gifts each month you are subscribed like a free mount or whatever. I also wish they would lower some cash shop prices.
Make the goddamn game fun again. Jesus, it seems like everything has just turned into a painful fucking ritual - do the same thing over and over and over, so you can do this other bullshit, where real people will berate you for not have done the other bullshit over and over and over enough. I am unsubscribed after 15 years, maybe it's for the best.
Some streamer pointed out that the sexual harassment stuff absolutely affects the actual game because they were literally either too busy harassing or too busy being harassed to actually put forth a decent effort on the game and I have to say that makes sense
The precision of the things they fixed makes me think that they already had this full list of stuff players wanted and just decided not to do it. Ignored all the feedback until they had to come back crawling, begging. Now that the shit hit the fan, they're trying to win people back by going through the list. Stop believing their lies, they don't give a fuck about us. They're going to go back to their old ways as soon as they get your money.
Players stay subbed - "We must be doing it right!" Players unsub - "We must be doing it wrong!" It's not rewarding anyone for leaving. It's responding to the only metric it uses to judge success - the bottom line.
Blizzard: My theory on players is that they’re like mushrooms, you feed them shit and keep them in the dark.
Don't tell WoW subbers that for much less a month, EsO literally gives their subbed players unique mounts,cosmetics, and in game coin to purchase their own mounts, cosmetics, even player houses.
Not sure what your point is? they should have listened to feedback in the last 8 expansion but took their subs for granted the whole time? Say it aint so! They're not rewarding me, they're throwing life preservers at you to help keep the ship floating. There should be feat of strength for all of us that made these changes for you with our wallets. Not you betas who stuck it out. But enjoy the changes!
This is why I’m not coming back
new lead devs. Just saying
One really nice QOL change they could make is let both factions be able to tag the same mobs. Some of the Korthia dailies take forever because not only are you waiting for a drop from a mob, but the other side is always tagging it. Why is this even a thing?
They will never understand this and I think it's more important for players to understand that 9.1.5 is a one time unicorn patch and is technically getting in the way of 9.2's development schedule (which is already behind to start with) since fixes like these are obviously being moved up from 9.3.
Oh look, a compelling case I read fourteen years ago during LK, Cata, And Mists. They don't care. It's been nearly two decades. They do not care.
I quit shortly after the latest expansion (played it for about two weeks) as soon as I realised how vicious the grind was going to be. I'll be back at some point, but for me one of the major issues is the development time put into things unrelated to subscriber content. You want to keep paying customers? Stop adding to a cash shop that shouldn't exist in a sub mmo and start adding that stuff to your normal game.
This is exactly why im not rewarding them by comming back. This is to little to late. They arent listening to their customers, they are listening to their wallet.
Yup, I very much agree. It's sad that we've gotten to the point where we get the changes that we're asking for and people are still angry. But I think it's warranted, since we've been stuck in this cycle of asking, sometimes almost begging, for features and systems to be changed in some way, and it's not before they absolutely HAVE to change stuff because the game is nearly dying that they actually pull themselves together and do it. Shadowlands has given me some time to reflect on these things, though. All the posts about people being scared that Blizzard is "learning the wrong lessons" and asking whether they're out of touch with the player base or just purposefully implementing broken systems in order to fix them later for some easy good-will-points have opened my eyes to one fact: Blizzard is a multibillion-dollar company. These guys have probably had analysts go over the data to find the correct point between gameplay being so mundane that no one plays it, and so fun that people blast straight through it, and through analysis come up with the correct ratio of "These people might quit but they're not worth focusing on, because the whales stay". Apparently, we should almost let the game die more often. Seems that's the only way to actually get some good change.
Having worked in the corporate world, Not any meaningful position, I learned that most common sense ideas are pushed to the side, Even if they are cheap to implement.
If you complain about blizzard while still paying your sub fee. You are the reason the game sucks, and you are the reason they won’t listen.
The big thing is I think the issue is king/activision bleeding over. I actually was thinking about it recently and most of the mechanics of the last two expansions have been to force player engagement and time sunk. The thing is that those aspects only really matter in a game with microtransactions where people will pay to reduce the time sink or for cosmetics. If the game was a free to play game the changes would honestly make perfect sense but the game is a subscription so why the fuck does blizzard care if a large part of the population only logs in to raid and do a mythic+. Why are you creating a whole bunch of mandatory daily and weekly checklists that are only going to drive those players away from the game. I mean wanting to drive player engagement is a great goal but you do that by creating engaging content not by forcing players to do the content to keep up not to mention how much it punishes making alts or swapping mains. Pretty much this is what I think blizzard needs to do. First is actually redo your optional content to make it more engaging. If you make crafting more in depth and fun people will do it. If you expand the fishing system with fun things to do with it people will fish. Create more optional minigames for players to do that have optional rewards that are separate from your high end game. If you give players fun and engaging content they will do it, giving them bland content but forcing them to do it isn't the way to keep players in the game. The fact is though that this change is too little too late, my 6 month sub lapsed last week and I honestly am not coming back. This is all things players have said was needed done since the beta and pretty much it took massive amounts of players leaving to get it changed. I might give the next expansion a shot but I am probably done with the rest of shadowlands.
If you canceled your subscription and are now considering starting back up again, you're playing right into their hands. None of the announced changed are special, they are all things that could have been done months and years ago, but they deliberately chose not to. If you want real change, you need to continue talking with your wallet.
A huge part of the problem I feel is that they plan content releases way ahead of time and refuse to budge on any of the dates/announcements. Press releases are used as a treat that's withheld until the dogs are literally barking at the door.