Why so many controversial decisions lately?

[docterfreeze]

I'm going to start at the beginning of MoP

- Deciding to make an expansion that doesn't quite fit in the Warcraft universe.

- Making talents incredibly simple and (imo) more cookie-cutter than ever.

- Cross Realm Zones and the stubbornness by Blizzard to not remove it.

- Daily quest overload and progression gear locked behind dailys.

- Deciding not to make new heroic 5-mans and instead making heroic scenarios.

- Making resilience baseline and nerfing PvP stats to utter uselessness.

- Making Elite PvP gear worthless.

- Cash shop fiasco currently going on.

I don't understand why Blizzard is making all these controversial decisions when the sub numbers are already bleeding, it's only making it worse on them.

[Lord Pebbleton]

I'd say they are trying different ways to see what do their customers like.
At least, i believe this was their intention with the daily quests overload.

[SL1200]

Because they think they can do no wrong. Wow developers are arrogant.

[Gimlix]

Because they think they can do no wrong. Wow developers are arrogant.

No they are not. that's just rude.

[Deleted]

This is nothing new. There was just as much qq about different shit in Cata, Wrath, BC, and Vanilla.

[Rhamses]

Wow, I actually like all of those changes except the scenarios.

Different strokes.

[Deleted]

This is nothing new. There was just as much qq about different shit in Cata, Wrath, BC, and Vanilla.

yes but this is extreme compared to other expacs

[jsz]

I guarantee you that you would hate this game much much more if it hadn't changed at all since the supposed "glory days" of BC/WotLK

[docterfreeze]

Especially to the point when according to the Q1 report they said that the main reason why many people left the game was because of too many changes.

I'm quite sure that what the OP describes is know as typical phenomena in business theory where organisation start spiraling out of control because they no longer think they can make any bad decisions.

According to an ex-employee AMA the head management being too arrogant and thinking themselves infallible was one of the major struggles the company had, in his opinion.

You happen to have the link to that AMA?

[Rhamses]

Especially to the point when according to the Q1 report they said that the main reason why many people left the game was because of too many changes.

I'm quite sure that what the OP describes is know as typical phenomena in business theory where organisation start spiraling out of control because they no longer think they can make any bad decisions.

According to an ex-employee AMA the head management being too arrogant and thinking themselves infallible was one of the major struggles the company had, in his opinion.

You're kidding right? Check out the situation with FF 14. THAT is an example of a dev and a game spiraling out of control.

WoW is just old. Its graphics look old. Believe it or not, people do play games because of graphics. Once that vanilla model overhaul goes through, you'll see subscriptions go up a bit. Will they stay up? I don't think so. Again, WoW is almost 10 years old.

[Stevecow]

I'm going to start at the beginning of MoP

- Deciding to make an expansion that doesn't quite fit in the Warcraft universe.

- Making talents incredibly simple and (imo) more cookie-cutter than ever.

- Cross Realm Zones and the stubbornness by Blizzard to not remove it.

- Daily quest overload and progression gear locked behind dailys.

- Deciding not to make new heroic 5-mans and instead making heroic scenarios.

- Making resilience baseline and nerfing PvP stats to utter uselessness.

- Making Elite gear worthless.

- Cash shop fiasco currently going on.

I don't understand why Blizzard is making all these controversial decisions when the sub numbers are already bleeding, it's only making it worse on them.

I can agree with the expansion that doesn't really fit but it still brought new raids to play and I thought they were decent raids.

I think making classes simple only applies to some classes as my druid there are several options to work with for Resto and Boomkin and I still change talents depending on the fight.

The only thing I didn't like with CRZ was the bugs that came with it like being dismounted for no reason and falling to my death. I just came to the fact that we are playing an MMO and I should see other people out there leveling even if I don't want to

The hiding gear behind daily quest is fine as long as they would hide all my options behind 1 faction and not 5. It needed to be toned down.

I don't PvP enough anymore to care or understand why they are changing things. So I don't have an opinion about it.

Elite gear as in the first boss fight of TOES elite gear? I'm not sure that was meant to be really special gear giving how easy it was to do the fight on elite mode. They don't need another ilvl of gear anyway, do they?

As for cash shop "fiasco", read my sig!

[Robert3620]

Maybe because they failed to learn the lessons of New Coke. Sometimes change for the sake of change is not always a good thing and sticking with what does even if it's boring is a good idea.

[ItachiZaku]

I'm going to start at the beginning of MoP

- Deciding to make an expansion that doesn't quite fit in the Warcraft universe. I like my monkey.

- Making talents incredibly simple and (imo) more cookie-cutter than ever. Yeah, this annoys me. I want my thorns and insect swarm back.

- Cross Realm Zones and the stubbornness by Blizzard to not remove it. I like it, fuck off.

- Daily quest overload and progression gear locked behind dailys. It's the same as it's always been, i dont' see a problem.

- Deciding not to make new heroic 5-mans and instead making heroic scenarios. Eh... I tended to like the new 5-mans, and I have only done maybe 3-4 Heroic Scenarios and I don't notice a difference other than not being able to queue for them.

- Making resilience baseline and nerfing PvP stats to utter uselessness. I'm more annoyed with lack of "I can kill a DPS as a healer" skills that I lost. No melee was capable of killing me 1v1, but more importantly, they knew early on that THEY were the one that had to go defensive, now? Heh, I just /sit and die cuz it's pointless most times, or I have to be a shift jockey for 4 minutes to a very persistant douche who wants to kill the battlemaster healer. /endrant

- Making Elite gear worthless. I don't know what you are talking about.

- Cash shop fiasco currently going on. I like it. It doesn't break anything. The only worry is that it WILL get to the point of pay to win.

I don't understand why Blizzard is making all these controversial decisions when the sub numbers are already bleeding, it's only making it worse on them.

My 2 pennies ^^

Change isn't always good. We change presidents and nothing ever changes. We change undies and, nvm.

[zorkuus]

- Deciding to make an expansion that doesn't quite fit in the Warcraft universe.

Whatever they do fits the warcraft universe. They write the lore, they make the rules, not the playerbase.

- Cross Realm Zones and the stubbornness by Blizzard to not remove it.

Stubborness against who? The vocal minority?

[docterfreeze]

Companies getting too arrogant is usually caused by a consumer base that isn't critical enough or doesn't complain about things it doesn't like enough.

Fanboys ruining their favourite brand is very common.

Except I see complaint threads on the official forums all the time, some even get the "High Rated" glow. The thing I don't see though, is blue responses to those very threads. I wouldn't blame the community's lack of feedback as much as Blizzard's lack of response.

They do, however, do a good job keeping us posted on technical issues. I'll give them that.

[SL1200]

So what do you want us to say?

For every item on your list there is somebody who loves it and somebody who hates it. Hell..just because there are backlash threads about the cash shop - what makes you call it a fiasco?

Here is a poll: http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...-the-cash-shop . And that poll was made when emotions ran really high, when the xp potion in the shop was datamined.

497 cared to vote. 497!. And you know what? 53% support or don't care. 235 people out of 347 000 MMO C users cared to vote. Now I REALLY would like to know how many people did indeed buy a mount or a helm. I know that 15 000 raised their hands when a free mount was given out and 7000 for a free transmog helm. Apparently THAT is what gets people to click a post button.

To answer your question. I cannot answer it WHY those decisons are made. Maybe because people requested some of them? It springs to my mind how GW 2 was hailed for doing away with the trinity of tank, healer, dps. How even here people complained that queue times were so long as dps. Voila: Scenarios. Insta queue times. Similar decisions may have lead to heroic scenarios: More options for pre-mades without having to rely on tanks or healers?

Maybe people quit caring about wow altogether? This site doesn't seem nearly as busy as it used to.

[Poppincaps]

I think MoP is an experimental expansion to see what works and what doesn't. They were on a high during Wrath, so they sat on their laurels in Cataclysm and got smacked down to reality for it. Now they're trying to find out what their playerbase truly wants.

[Deleted]

- Making resilience baseline and nerfing PvP stats to utter uselessness.

- Making Elite gear worthless.

These are the only things I care about in the list you've provided. Though the lag I get when I zone in and out of a CRZ is kind of a bummer....

The PvP mechanics changes and direction PvP has been taken seems to be down to complete incompetence, which has been evident since the S9/S10 mmr fiasco.

And the change to elite gear is something they should have done with Cata, with weps like Gurthalak being better than T2 anyway.

I wouldn't call these "controversial".

I think MoP is an experimental expansion to see what works and what doesn't. They were on a high during Wrath, so they sat on their laurels in Cataclysm and got smacked down to reality for it. Now they're trying to find out what their playerbase truly wants.

This sounds a little bit optimistic, personally I just think they're a bit confused about the direction they want to take the game in.

[ComputerNerd]

"Controversial" is an opinion.
What this looks like is cherry picked decisions that you personally disagree with, and to try and justify the complaints you call them controversial, when they are in many ways no worse than a lot others.


- Deciding to make an expansion that doesn't quite fit in the Warcraft universe.
Opinion
- Making talents incredibly simple and (imo) more cookie-cutter than ever.
Opinion, how much room did you really have for variation before ? Less than we have now.

- Cross Realm Zones and the stubbornness by Blizzard to not remove it.
Most complaints come from those who now have competition for something.
There has been a persistent complaint about lack of population on some realms, and CRZ is part of the solution for that.
You disagree with it, does not make it wrong.


- Daily quest overload and progression gear locked behind dailys.
Being improved, but people seem unwililng to reference any of the 5.4 changes when complaining about dailies, because that would give them nothing to complain about.

- Deciding not to make new heroic 5-mans and instead making heroic scenarios.
Your preferred content being left at the expense of something else.
Same argument used by elitist raiders who are upset that someone else gets some of the attention.

- Making resilience baseline and nerfing PvP stats to utter uselessness.
PvE has a gear progression where you can face opponents for whom you are geared for.
PvP has no such progression and is in effect placing newly level capped vs raid geared players.
This is much fairer, whether you like it or not.

- Making Elite gear worthless.
See above, pvp has been driven by gear way too much rather than skill.

- Cash shop fiasco currently going on.
Its called a fisaco by biased players.
Notice how little people mention mounts and pets which are exactly the same situation as the helms.
XP boosts are being blown out of proportion by players incapable of coming up with an original or genuine argument.
Lesser charms conversion is limited by weekly quest. Easily reached by many players, only speeds up the start. Does not give a higher amount than someone else is likely to earn.

[paralleluniverse]

- Making talents incredibly simple and (imo) more cookie-cutter than ever.

No. The new talent system has mostly been successful at killing cookie cutter specs. Under the old talent system, there was only 1 way to choose talents for a spec (give or take 1-2 points). Now there are virtually no cookie-cutter specs. For example, Simcraft and Elitist Jerks, which had previously advised on cookie cutter specs no longer lists how to spec for many talent points. Therefore, the new system is a major triumph and success.

- Cross Realm Zones and the stubbornness by Blizzard to not remove it.

Cross-realm zones are the future. They clearly seem to be moving towards the idea of megaservers, where everything is one server, and you are automatically put into instances of that server. Most realms currently have massive faction or population imbalances which makes world PvP pointless.

Killing realms is absolutely and fundamentally necessary for the future of MMOs and ensuring balance.

- Making resilience baseline and nerfing PvP stats to utter uselessness.

Removing the effect of gear on PvP would be a good move. But Blizzard has only gone halfway. They should move to the GW2 model where PvP is 100% skill and 0% gear.