Ensidia Buzzkill's blog about wow community managers and nostalgia

[Deleted]

but seems way off-base about CM's and their role.

If you would have read his blogs it's his style to bash people. Nothing new there. Actually this is one of his least offensive blogs.

[Punisher069]

I guess I can't enjoy WoW anymore. Seriously though nostalgia is a weird thing.

[Yriel]

Get real bro. As company's representatives they can never say things like "the current model sucks", even if they would really think that. You can pick any big company and they will never ever say things like "our older product was better" or something comparable to that to the public. That would not only hurt the sales of the product, but also make company look like bunch of idiots.

Or there is a difference of being an elite raider and defending your privileges vs. creating content and trying to make a game that appeals to everyone. I guess his views changed since he saw the other side of the process.
And if it were just PR-talk they why did he change the game so much ? Epics for badges, epics for honor, epics from heroics, that all started in BC and he was fully responsible for Naxx 25. The game did change under his leadership to cater more and more for the non-elites.
And don't tell me he had no choice, Ghostcrawler is just the lead systems designer and if you read the forums he apparently can change every aspect of the game to his whim, Kaplan was the Game Director for WoW.

[Xeraxis]

Yeah, but the thing is, that's kind of well written blog. I wouldnt call him being "full of shit".

So if someone presents you with a shiny turd it's no longer shit but artwork in your eyes? Sorry but shit is shit no matter how eloquent it is.

[Yriel]

How can something be bad, when the game was growing? WoW was up to 10 Million Players before Wrath of the Leech Kid...

Because the game was at the height of its hype at TBC and was released in all corners of the world ? There were all kinds of reasons why the numbers grew in the first years, i bet that "the raids are soo hardcore" wasn't among the top 10.
And if it really were as you say, do you really think they'd changed their game principles to a way that they would get less subscriber simply out of spite for the hardcores ?

[Frozenbeef]

me having to fly to instances didn't give me a sense of community...i barely saw anyone outside org/ironforge/shatt as i had to constantly ask in chat for group members then during the instance if we wiped the group disbanded and the search started again -.-

You honestly don't know how annoying it was for alliance to do scholomance/ strat and have to fly back and forth to a main city just to find group members -.-

Not having flying mounts didn't suddenly fill the world with people as people were either doing the same as above or just grinding elites for gold -.-

I really don't know what game people are thinking of when they say vanilla was the most fun but it definitely wasn't wow in any sense of the word -.-

[Lord Blackmore]

Flasks optional in vanilla? Seriously dude? Clearly you've never done Naxx 40, going to get Onyxia buff and STV buff before Loatheb attempts and being flasked and potted up the ass -_-. Lets stick to points that are actually true if we're gonna go on a bashing spree

If flasks were optional, I sure wasted a lot of time farming materials.

--

I've been playing since 2005 and the game has changed in good ways and bad ways. I've always felt it's better to embrace what the game is and not spend too much time thinking about what it used to be. I've enjoyed classic wow and all of the expansions.

[yjmark]

meh - imho, wow community back then was based more on the newness of the game, and not on how it was set up. If it was still setup the same way, I think the community would be significantly worse than it is now. Around mid-TBC, the playerbase really started changing from the "wow, this new game is great, and spending tons of time to do anything is ok" to "can't wait to reach max level and raid!". It was a natural progression as the playerbase matured, and more people started experiencing the awesomeness of max level.

[Arbs]

Correct me if i am wrong, but is this post basically complaining about Flying Mounts ??

[Yriel]

That is in parts probably true, but my point still stands. Ghostcrawler is the front man who should be made responsible for the big casualisation in WotLK. I doubt Tigole had much say in that.

Kaplan did fully design Naxx 25 though and in the interviews he was quite proud of it.
And Ghostcrawler is a system designer. He does the balancing. He doesn't direct the general direction of the game, he didn't design the LFD or LFR. He's responsible for buffing or nerfing your class and for deciding how much HP and damage a Raidboss has. That's what a system designer does. He crunches numbers. And the UI. It's just that he constantly seeks the contact with the community and since (as a lead) he is in all the important conferences and can tell all the new stuff to the players.
I think it's sad that he is made the scapegoat by so many people who don't even know what he does. And i bet the same people complain that in other games the actual devs never talk to the players and they point to GC as a positive example....

Edit 2: And to add just a couple of examples for legends being built, old players from my server... and I mean EVERYONE who played classic, can instantly tell you who got the first thunderfury, which guillds were there to support him, which guild opened AQ for the server and which player got that black Qui'raj mount, etc. You knew the names of good raid leaders, you knew the people that rocked in Warsong. We have less and less players that can tell stories of epic Alterac battles that actually lasted over an entire weekend. When I tell generation WotLK about an Alterac lasting for 3 entire days (!), they can hardly believe me. Nowadays, nothing is worth recounting and telling someone, because it's all meaningless. How am I to motivate someone to join me play a game where there is not even the slightest chance of epicness happening?

Sorry, I'm not going to recommend WoW to anyone anymore. Haven't done so since Cataclysm. Personally I still liked WotLK, but after that I lost faith...

You see that's what i meant earlier. I play since the EU release. I have no idea who got the first thunderfury or who got one at all back then. The elite guilds on my server were very secluded, you never saw them anywhere. I also have no idea who opened AQ. I just know that it was some allies but i didn't know a single alliance guild back then. I tried to be there when the gates were opened but the server crashed so much that it was impossible to take a flight route and when i finally rode there i had massive lags as large numbers of people where hitting this huge Anubis things because apparently they dropped something good although no one could ever loot them since the server didn't show them at the position it registered the kill so that the loot icon was always grey.
And i was at the Alterac battles and although they were quite epic, they were since it was something new. I wouldn't want to play them now since it was not really satisfying to fight there for 3 hours, capture one graveyard, lose it an hour later and never know who won in the end since it was always resolved at 5 a.m. in the morning. Although the linked graveyards were a good idea.

So you see your experiences differ quite a lot from mine. They are just that, personal experiences. You apparently were in a great guild on a great server and had a good time and i'm happy for you. But that doesn't show that the game was better, i just shows that i apparently was better for you.

[Slant]

Yes, and since you obviously never connected to a community, the lack of a community is apparently no problem for you. It is for people like me, though. So whatever they do, they don't affect you or they affect you in a positive way, while they already did affect my gameplay in a negative way. I'm also pretty sure that Kaplan more or less said goodbye at the end of TBC, even if he was still working on Naxx (lol... the little work that was actually done there...).

And I totally blame Ghostcrawler exactly for the things you described, class balance is a tricky thing, but there is something like "too much normalisation". And he also made the mistake to defend the casual position a couple of times too often for people like me not to blame him. He is but one person, but he represents the side of Blizzard that doesn't care about us. And the community bleeds out. People like me are leaving. In a trickle, sure, nothing dramatic. But the community shifts more and more toward a casual attitude and this is a vicious circle. Do you ever wonder why hardcore players and progression raiders make the blog posts that Buzzkill made? It's a desperate attempt to break that circle. But in the end, we know we'll never get heard. We'll get token concessions from Blizzard (like the new thunderforged items, lol... like that's going to make a change either way). And that's it.

So yeah, my experience differs from yours. I'm just glad Youtube is conserving some of the moments. Because it's unlikely they'll come back.

[Yriel]

Yes, and since you obviously never connected to a community, the lack of a community is apparently no problem for you. It is for people like me, though. So whatever they do, they don't affect you or they affect you in a positive way, while they already did affect my gameplay in a negative way. I'm also pretty sure that Kaplan more or less said goodbye at the end of TBC, even if he was still working on Naxx (lol... the little work that was actually done there...).

Where do you get that from ? I met great people back then. I founded a guild with them and now, all the years later, i'm still in that guild and half of the founders and a lot of people who joined back then are still there, too. Oh and we are the oldest guild on the server now.
I found an awesome community, we had multiple RL meetings, i had (and still have) a lot of fun with them. I just never saw this server community you described. I don't know if it wasn't there on my server or if it was just a thing the elites did among themselves (that would be my guess). So all the stuff you described was probably shared among just a handful of guilds. You were part of this. Congratulations. But that didn't make it the same for everyone.

And I totally blame Ghostcrawler exactly for the things you described, class balance is a tricky thing, but there is something like "too much normalisation". And he also made the mistake to defend the casual position a couple of times too often for people like me not to blame him. He is but one person, but he represents the side of Blizzard that doesn't care about us. And the community bleeds out. People like me are leaving. In a trickle, sure, nothing dramatic. But the community shifts more and more toward a casual attitude and this is a vicious circle. Do you ever wonder why hardcore players and progression raiders make the blog posts that Buzzkill made? It's a desperate attempt to break that circle. But in the end, we know we'll never get heard. We'll get token concessions from Blizzard (like the new thunderforged items, lol... like that's going to make a change either way). And that's it.

So yeah, my experience differs from yours. I'm just glad Youtube is conserving some of the moments. Because it's unlikely they'll come back.

So you leaving kills the community ? What community ? As i said there is not "the" community. Sorry to say that but i doubt anyone on my server will notice you leave. And although everyone leaving hurts the game in a way since it gets less profitable sometimes there is nothing you can do.
And all those blogs you mention... can it be that people are simply burned out after so many years of the same game but since WoW got such a big part of their lifestyle they won't accept it? They want the good old times back when the game was fresh and new but it will never get fresh and new again.

[Deleted]

Buzzkill is a legend!!! I have total respect for that dude. He is 150% right about the things in his article. And I totally agree about the point that the game today is NOTHING compared to how the game used to be. Blizzard changed it all so it´s like a complete new game today, all that "WoW" feeling about the game is gone for me as well. I must agree on that WoW lost it´s "feeling" after WOTLK, for me it died in the later part of Cata. Since Blizzard thinks the game it perfect as it is today they won´t see me coming back anytime soon atleast. To bad because I really liked the game as it was in vanilla -> wotlk.

My total respect to Buzzkill from a fellow lock!

[Nigeldruid]

I reckon it's all about the game being fresh. When I first installed WoW, I was happy just to run around killing things. As you mature as a player, you demand more and more things, such as an actual endgame, and you want to do less and less things such as traveling and are generally looking for a convenient solution. This is all fine, and a natural part of playing an MMO.

Now to me, the issue is that as the players matured, so did the game (naturally). To avoid having to develop content to multiple different kinds of players, Blizzard have tried to squeeze all players into the same content. Since the matured players wont live without the parts of the game they have gotten used to, these features have to be offered to the newer players, otherwise the matured players would quit. To not overwhelm the new players with these features (which would make them quit), they are brought down to a level of complexity where the new players don't fall too far behind.

What they should have done, I don't know. They might even have done the right thing. But I reckon that's why we see people complain...

[Deleted]

While the blog doesn't really make the author look like a genius there's some truth in there. If only he had gone the etxra mile and looked at how these things affect all 3 blizzard franchises these days...

Edit: I quit Wow, cancelled my HotS preorder and never bought D3. Hoping for change but doubt it'll happen.

[killidan]

Yes, and since you obviously never connected to a community, the lack of a community is apparently no problem for you. It is for people like me, though. So whatever they do, they don't affect you or they affect you in a positive way, while they already did affect my gameplay in a negative way. I'm also pretty sure that Kaplan more or less said goodbye at the end of TBC, even if he was still working on Naxx (lol... the little work that was actually done there...).

And I totally blame Ghostcrawler exactly for the things you described, class balance is a tricky thing, but there is something like "too much normalisation". And he also made the mistake to defend the casual position a couple of times too often for people like me not to blame him. He is but one person, but he represents the side of Blizzard that doesn't care about us. And the community bleeds out. People like me are leaving. In a trickle, sure, nothing dramatic. But the community shifts more and more toward a casual attitude and this is a vicious circle. Do you ever wonder why hardcore players and progression raiders make the blog posts that Buzzkill made? It's a desperate attempt to break that circle. But in the end, we know we'll never get heard. We'll get token concessions from Blizzard (like the new thunderforged items, lol... like that's going to make a change either way). And that's it.

So yeah, my experience differs from yours. I'm just glad Youtube is conserving some of the moments. Because it's unlikely they'll come back.

Well said, mate!

The direction of the game removed any socialization and any connection between effort and reward. People used to have their friend lists full, you had to delete one to friend a new person. Now it's "I don't give a fuck, it's LFD/LFR". It felt so good when I got a loot upgrade I had put effort into getting. Now, all loot is free in LFR, just login and purples come your way while running mindlessly in a raid instance. You get the same loot as a hardcore raider, minus couple ilevels. Why would I bother to raid then?

[Deleted]

Where do you get that from ? I met great people back then. I founded a guild with them and now, all the years later, i'm still in that guild and half of the founders and a lot of people who joined back then are still there, too. Oh and we are the oldest guild on the server now.
I found an awesome community, we had multiple RL meetings, i had (and still have) a lot of fun with them. I just never saw this server community you described. I don't know if it wasn't there on my server or if it was just a thing the elites did among themselves (that would be my guess). So all the stuff you described was probably shared among just a handful of guilds. You were part of this. Congratulations. But that didn't make it the same for everyone.

Appearently your definition of a community is different from the actual meaning. What you found is your own group of buddies - which in itself is pretty cool. But that isn't a community in the sense of how it's defined. A community is far more wide-spanning and connects more than just a guild. It connects everyone to some degree or another - be it in gaming or in a little real-life town.

In the example regarding knowing who got Thunderfury or who opened AQ40 (and that THAT GOD DAMN BLACK DRONE I WANT IT) - I know both. I also knew the major Alliance and Horde Guilds on my server (though there were smaller ones of equal importance). I knew who had the Arcanite Reaper recipes (very few) and who had at least 5 bank alts and would sell you anything you needed for a lower price than the auction house, because they found gathering, trading and interacting more fun than actual gameplay (we still got those people, they play the AH). I knew the majority of the Warlock players, since we had our own little chat channel set up for the class. It was a big mix between hardcore raiders and casually playing people. Everyone knew who the reliable Tanks and Healers were or who was at the very least extremly fun to play with, even if they wiped your group once or twice for a good laugh (people were used to failure, today your entire group would just quit on you or kick you out). As much as people knew which PvP players not to engage and to run from them, because they'd wipe the floor with you. Everyone was way more connected. I guess not every server per se had it, or maybe you didn't quite care and didn't connect with the rest of yours. Maybe it was also part of how many people played. The original WoW sales were only 250k copies on Day 1. That grew to over 2.4 Million Day 1 Sales with TBC. So the original groups were smaller per server, so that clearly helps with building bonds.

So you leaving kills the community ? What community ? As i said there is not "the" community. Sorry to say that but i doubt anyone on my server will notice you leave. And although everyone leaving hurts the game in a way since it gets less profitable sometimes there is nothing you can do.
And all those blogs you mention... can it be that people are simply burned out after so many years of the same game but since WoW got such a big part of their lifestyle they won't accept it? They want the good old times back when the game was fresh and new but it will never get fresh and new again.

You have no idea how much people within such a community can be affected by someone leaving. Imagine someone who is a cornerstone of your raid, like a class leader or a main tank leaving your guild. We had multiple such impact, but on a community scale. From a very thoughtful and funny guy that always managed to crack up people that were a bit down because their guild didn't perform well that night to one guy who actually was the one thing holding a guild alliance together (he left the game and soon after both guild leaders - that appearently weren't very compatibel without his reasonable influence - went and managed to shatter not only their raid alliance but in about half a year after both guilds died). If you want a better idea of how this affected people in the "good old not so golden days" you can always go and look at what impact it has on EVE. Old wars between corporation that were realitively at peace begin again without the diplomatic guys that build a truce. A Corporation leader leaving can change the entire power balance in the EVE universe. And so on and so on.

It has really not so much to do with being "burned out" - it has to do with what went away in-between expansions over a time. Obviously people get burned out and bored, that is something that happens. I have taken a lot of breaks in my WoW time before I finally quit. But the reason I quit was pretty much that nobody was left in the game to connect to and all the interesting things that originally drew me to the game went away (class diversity, trying out new builds, actually replacing my blue gear with something that was purple instead of just making sure I am all geared out in the default purples). I had the luck of meeting a few people during Wrath, which kept me playing after Ulduar, but those guys went away one by one towards the end of the expansion and at some point pretty much all that was left of my connection to my fellow WoW players was stupidity of trade chat and gearscore. So, I quit about 2 months into Cataclysm.

What went away for me is my connection I had not only to the game world, but also the people within it - as well as any remote resemblance of uniqueness. And I think that is what a lot of people here miss as well. I have no wish to return to WoW and with how Blizzard currently is changing it's direction in all of their games, I also have little hope for Titan being appealing to me.

I guess most games these days are focused on the new generation of "gamer" - the guys with no time, no patience and no wish to actually improve themselves at what they do, because it feels like "work". Luckily sometimes there are Gems like Dark Souls for those that still thrive on being beaten down and getting back up to try again. I just wish we had more of these.

[Mormolyce]

I'm willing to bet you never played pre-wotlk if you think the game has more depth now. The single biggest change they made that stripped a lot of the complexity away was homogenizing all the classes. You probably don't remember this, but there was a time when each class was unique, all bringing something original to a raid. Certain classes benefited each other exclusively, like Shadow Priests and Warlocks. Terms like 'class syngery' existed. Raid composition was 1000 times more important and complex than it is now. Do you remember stats like armon pen and spell pen, removed in the name of "streamlining"? What about attunements? How about heroic dungeons that required more coordination and thought than current normal raidfights?

I remember all those things. I remember how shit unique buffs were that handicapped your raid group if you didn't have enough of class X, or meant you couldn't play with your friend who was class Y because you had too many of them. Which still exists to a lesser extent, and I hope they continue to reduce the number of unique buffs. This was never a good thing in the game, added nothing, required no skill or player interaction, it simply prejudiced your raid comp and forced you to take certain classes or get gimped. Perfect example of a bad design that was improved. How is raid comp being important a good thing? It is obviously bad. Raid performance is what should matter.

Yes I remember armor pen and spell pen, don't know why anyone mourns them (well not true, I know why people mourn them it's because they played classes for which those stats were BiS). Or why you think removing one stat and creating a new one (Mastery, which is a lot more interesting BTW) is some kind of huge deal. So what?

Attunements? God why do people hold this shitty design up as some kind of wonderful lost holy grail of WoW? I enjoyed those quest chains personally, but having to run through a bunch of quests to even get into a raid on every alt? That's just a bad design. If they were back the forums would be wall to wall people bitching about them and demanding Blizzard remove them and you damn well know it.

And they put hard heroic dungeons back in the game when Cata launched. I loved them myself. Apparently a huge proportion of people hated them though, so in MoP they made Heroics easy and put the hard stuff in Challenge Modes, which is an awesome solution. For me as well - I don't have to worry about idiots in my pug making my weekly VP grind interminable, and at the same time if I want a challenge I can put together a proper group of friends and go do it. I'll give you this though, the MoP heroics did go a little far in making them easy so this is the only one of your objections that isn't totally utterly ridiculous.

P.S. All of the mechanics changes you mentioned here happened AFTER Wrath not before.

[Mormolyce]

In the example regarding knowing who got Thunderfury or who opened AQ40 (and that THAT GOD DAMN BLACK DRONE I WANT IT) - I know both. I also knew the major Alliance and Horde Guilds on my server (though there were smaller ones of equal importance). I knew who had the Arcanite Reaper recipes (very few) and who had at least 5 bank alts and would sell you anything you needed for a lower price than the auction house, because they found gathering, trading and interacting more fun than actual gameplay (we still got those people, they play the AH). I knew the majority of the Warlock players, since we had our own little chat channel set up for the class. It was a big mix between hardcore raiders and casually playing people. Everyone knew who the reliable Tanks and Healers were or who was at the very least extremly fun to play with, even if they wiped your group once or twice for a good laugh (people were used to failure, today your entire group would just quit on you or kick you out). As much as people knew which PvP players not to engage and to run from them, because they'd wipe the floor with you. Everyone was way more connected. I guess not every server per se had it, or maybe you didn't quite care and didn't connect with the rest of yours. Maybe it was also part of how many people played. The original WoW sales were only 250k copies on Day 1. That grew to over 2.4 Million Day 1 Sales with TBC. So the original groups were smaller per server, so that clearly helps with building bonds.

Everyone in my current guild knew which guilds were top of our realm's progression through all of Cata. Most of us know a large group of people in those other guilds. We knew who the first player on our realm was who got Tarecgosa's Rest. We knew the person who got the first set of Rogue legendaries on our realm (me ^_^). And the second. I know who a lot of the really rich players on my realm are, or I know people who know them.

You know what I honestly think? I think a lot of old players who say they don't know who anyone is on their realm and therefore there's no more community feel that way just because they aren't participating in the community as much as they used to. This is probably because they've been playing a long time, and the longer you play the more people you used to know stop playing (not one single person I knew when I started playing still is - I've seen three guilds I was in completely die in that time). And when you play the game at a high end in a guild environment you don't get out much or pug much so you are no longer making new friends to replace the old ones that left. Or if your guild is full of people who do actually stick around, you just get more secluded and wind up hanging around the same group of people all the time and get the impression the rest of the community is dead.

And also, it was a lot easier to know everyone on your server back in Vanilla when there were a lot less people. Also, a lot smaller proportion of the population was at max level or raiding and therefore interacting with the rest of the server (this may all be different if you're on a low pop server of course).

[Deleted]

Everyone in my current guild knew which guilds were top of our realm's progression through all of Cata. Most of us know a large group of people in those other guilds. We knew who the first player on our realm was who got Tarecgosa's Rest. We knew the person who got the first set of Rogue legendaries on our realm (me ^_^). And the second. I know who a lot of the really rich players on my realm are, or I know people who know them.

You know what I honestly think? I think a lot of old players who say they don't know who anyone is on their realm and therefore there's no more community feel that way just because they aren't participating in the community as much as they used to. This is probably because they've been playing a long time, and the longer you play the more people you used to know stop playing (not one single person I knew when I started playing still is - I've seen three guilds I was in completely die in that time). And when you play the game at a high end in a guild environment you don't get out much or pug much so you are no longer making new friends to replace the old ones that left. Or if your guild is full of people who do actually stick around, you just get more secluded and wind up hanging around the same group of people all the time and get the impression the rest of the community is dead.

And also, it was a lot easier to know everyone on your server back in Vanilla when there were a lot less people. Also, a lot smaller proportion of the population was at max level or raiding and therefore interacting with the rest of the server (this may all be different if you're on a low pop server of course).

Ye, I mentioned the numbers being part of it. Game was much smaller back when. But the lack of actually looking for people on your server to group with is also a big factor. LFG now works to some degree if you meet fun people to add to your list cross-realm, but when I stopped that didn't exist.

Legendaries I stopped caring, because there are SO. FUCKING. MANY. To this day the only Legendary I really ever will give a damn about is Atiesh, because it is one of the few items that are now unobtainable (Necro Knights and Rim-Covered anyone?) and it was frigging hard to get at the time. Gold also is inflated beyond all reason. You can make a gold in the 100.000s just by leveling from 1 to 90 as I hear it.

I stopped caring about progression after Naxx25. I got excited again for it during Ulduar, but I stopped caring entirely after Colliseum. I couldn't even tell you who did the first Heroic Sinestra kill. Probably Paragon. It didn't really matter anymore for me to be part of the race itself, as it was when I really raided my soul out. And that really was the BWL/AQ40 time. As I said, I didn't raid a lot during TBC and only played a bit of catch-up later for the story.

I think for me the issue was partially with how devalued the items felt. If you played Classic, you were amazed to have a blue item. In Wrath and Cata every Quest seemed to give a blue. Hell, I was decked out in purples so fast I didn't feel like it mattered anymore if I got a good item, because it would only increase my DPS, not make me feel like I actually got more powerful. I started to hunt for skins years ago and my bank is full of items with pretty but I stopped giving a damn about everything else stats wise. Also, green drops are no longer viable gear, but just material for enchanters to destroy.

But combined with the gameplay getting less and less about diversity of classes (and that thus far every Warlock rework before MoP fell flat of what we expected from Blizz) I think it just didn't matter to me anymore at some point. For some the new WoW is far better, I get that. But for me everything that happened took away "my WoW" if you can get that.

All in all I am a old relic for the new way WoW picked. Between people leaving and it getting very hard to really find new people that fit into my category of "casually pro" and the game changing from something where I felt happy when I had worked hard to achieve something to just picking up the items Blizz threw at me like some kind of cheap blings I just kinda got left on the road I guess. And I doubt it will ever capture that kind of thing again. So I am happy to be part of the experience, but it saddens me that some will never get it