The 5 worst decisions blizzard has made to Wow - Your opinions

[Alanar]

Pandaria - Before this gets quoted and hated on.. I just want to say that I love the artwork and appreciate all the effort that went into creating this zone. The new textures, the models, etc. However, it just doesn't feel right being there. I just can't get the sense of being in a true WoW expansion surrounded by Asian inspired culture and talking martial art Pandas.

Look at the Burning Crusade, it was dark, the land was torn and you felt like you were in a WoW expansion.

This is exactly how I feel about Pandaria.. hell I thought I was the only one..
Everytime i logg in right now.. I just don't know where to go.. pandaria feels off for me and done all the stuff, I loved 5.2 purely cus of the artwork/troll.zandalar stuff on the island it felt like I was in warcraft again..

[Deleted]

They sold out. That's when the ME-generation and shareholders took over development of the game. That's the worst decision they made for the game but evidently it was a great business decision.

[Tomana]

They sold out. That's when the ME-generation and shareholders took over development of the game. That's the worst decision they made for the game but evidently it was a great business decision.

They sold out in 1994. You're about 20 years late XDD

[Deleted]

They sold out in 1994. You're about 20 years late XDD

Was thinking more about the "recent" Activision merger.

[Tomana]

Was thinking more about the "recent" Activision merger.

Blizzard was already owned by Vivendi at that time, as was Activision. It was not a sold-out, but Vivendi regrouping two game editors together.

[Deleted]

Blizzard was already owned by Vivendi at that time, as was Activision. It was not a sold-out, but Vivendi regrouping two game editors together.

No it wasn't. Activision didn't come into the picture until 2008.

[Tomana]

No it wasn't. Activision didn't come into the picture until 2008.

Please reread what I said and stop being silly. In 2008, Vivendi acquired Activision. So both Activision and Blizzard (via Vivendi games) were owned by Vivendi. They were just operating completely separately. What Vivendi did is merge the two companies together, so that a certain number of costs (e.g. marketing & distribution) would be shared between the two. Activision didn't "buy" Blizzard, as a certain number of idiots on this forum seem to think. So please don't be one of them.

[Constraint]

Dude fucking get over it,so sick of this argument,you played Orcs Trolls Night Elves UNDEAD!!! Worgen Goblins Dwarfs, TAURENS!!!! A COW FOR GOD SAKE! and yet a simple panda even though its been in the game since WC3 bothers you. Its like those idiots that shout on trade "THIS GAME IS SO UNREALISTIC" response = "Dude your on a flying horse and your undead....."

I'm not sick of this argument at all. While Pandas certainly don't make my top 5 list, or even my top 50, I still completely understand him. There's a subtle difference between the fact that there are resurrected people in undead form as playable races and the fact that an entire expansion has been devoted to a race of farming Pandas who are absolutely OBSESSED with Asian culture, to a fucking ridiculous extent. Could it get any less subtle/immersion breaking? Not really.

[Deleted]

Please reread what I said and stop being silly. In 2008, Vivendi acquired Activision. So both Activision and Blizzard (via Vivendi games) were owned by Vivendi. They were just operating completely separately. What Vivendi did is merge the two companies together, so that a certain number of costs (e.g. marketing & distribution) would be shared between the two. Activision didn't "buy" Blizzard, as a certain number of idiots on this forum seem to think. So please don't be one of them.

Fine, you're right, I don't give a shit how Activision came into the picture I only care that they did. It APPEARED™ as if Blizzard became more oriented towards pleasing stockholders rather than maintaining their integrity after Activision made their entrance, that was my point.

Every decision Blizzard has made since Activision stepped in appears to have been made to increase representation at max level and make content accessible to everyone, for better and for worse, mostly worse. Which I then assume they have done in order to be able to show better figures to their stockholders. I might be crazy, I dunno, but to me there is a correlation here.

[TheFBWA]

1: Not making the Farm and Garrisons available as one place for all of your characters on your account.
Individually it is too many dailies and too many hours wasted in the case of the farm, and too big of a money sink to have multiple garrisons.

2: CRZ. The mixing of too many servers that have nothing in common between their communities causing disharmony and constant trolling. At the same time it has been a godsend for some dead servers.

3: Not fixing Silvermoon and Azuremyst isle to be up to current standards or even outland standards.

4: Not retooling leveling so the time line differences make sense.
BC and WOTLK should be entrances in Caverns of Time with quests sending you there at appropriate levels and not accessible in the open world, to keep timelines current and story flow working.

5: IMHO the monk class has never lived up to its hype. It just comes across as a mish mash of button mashing, with little umphf.

[Galluccio]

The worst things for the game:

1) arena: total waste
2) heroic mode : catered to the. 1 percent
3) removing past titles From the game and making 100 percent mount drops as 1 percent.
4) 40 man raids
5) world first achivements
6) formal molten core raiding idea and every raid after that. Formal raiding. Doing shat, scholomance, and ubrs/Lbrs was the real direction to go. Now we have all these entitled elitists.

[Irian]

Although these might seem harsh I do want to say that overall I'm pretty satisfied where WoW is at the moment in MoP. These are more or less just nitpicks and pretty much just personal opinion (obviously, but some people seem to take their opinion as fact so I felt this needed to be said).
In order from most important to least:

1. Flying mounts. I dare anyone who disagrees to name one thing they actually added to the game world that couldn't have been accomplished through ground mounts. For all they removed from the game by detaching the player from the world, they added nothing.

2. Arena. WoW was never designed to be a competitive game. I didn't like the idea when it came out in BC and I still don't like it now, because now the game has to be balanced in PvP around crap that the majority of the playerbase really doesn't care about.

3. LFR. The entire idea of what LFR is supposed to be according to Blizzard themselves is the complete opposite of what it is in reality. "No pressure" Tank an LFR and tell me that it is not more of a pain than a flex raid. "Raiding on your lunch break" I'm sorry, but when have people started to have 3+ hour lunch breaks? Between the queue time, the trash, the bosses themselves with the amount of 50k DPS you get grouped with, the inevitable wipes and the waiting for healer queues after said wipes, you certainly cannot complete an LFR wing on your lunch break, Blizz. Sorry.

4. Homogenization of raid buffs and utility, and the "removal" of hybrid tax. Honestly, what was wrong with the previous system? If you want to top meters, play a pure dps. Hybrids have awesome raid buffs and utility but their dps will be slightly behind the pures. Every class contributes in some way to a raid setting. I seriously see nothing wrong with this system, and I don't see where it needed to be changed. If hybrids are above pures, there's no reason to bring a pure DPS since hybrids can offspec tank/heals. If hybrids don't have enough individual utility and do less DPS, they don't get taken over pure DPS. It was a pointless change and only served to make people feel less useful in a raid setting overall.

5. The removal of "fun" and flavor abilities like Eyes of the Beast from hunters and their completely stubborn refusal to re-implement them despite the fact that they know they screwed up.

[Notdev]

1) Fusing of 10/25 man lockouts in Cata. One of the decisions that hurt this game the most, IMO. Really wrecked a massive amount of 25 man guilds, both hardcore and casual, since 10 mans were less work (not talking about difficulty) and yielded the same rewards.

2) Cataclysm raid content. This expansion could have been fantastic. They shouldn't have trashed the 4th raid tier. They should have put more effort into Dragon Soul and the Deathwing encounters. Both FL and DS should have been bigger or accompanied by a smaller raid. They really didn't put forth the usual effort into the raiding content this expansion.

On paper, Deathwing shouldn't have been that far behind the LK as a recognizable endboss. He didn't show up in enough questlines or in raids until DS. LK showed his face in ToC and you heard his voice in Naxx, and was literally all over the place in quests. Also sucks we never got to face Deathwing's human form in combat, would have been a great heroic only boss in FL or extra phase on Madness heroic.

All this, not even mentioning what not doing #1 could have done for the expansion. The difficulty of normals relative to WoTLK normals (and 5 mans to a lesser extent) really turned people off of PvE for a while. I wasn't one of them, but casual/social guilds that could throw a raid together and kill a few bosses are a very important part of the WoW community. It's where most people get started in, including people that end up in high ranked hardcore guilds. Casual guilds/players failing to have a place to raid lead to the need for LFR, which is a neccessity now but terrible for the game (IMO). Sort of unrelated, but i think LFR doesn't have a place in the game next expansion.

Just a huge miss. Deathwing could have been an epic antagonist.

3) When an ability is OP in PvP OR PvE (not both) they nerf it in both aspects. Having abilities scale differently or do behave slightly differently would be a huge improvement. They did this for CC, and certain abilities like Colossus Smash, but they should do it for a lot more than just those two.

Probably a few more I can think of.

[Deleted]

- banning bots in waves: it might cheap to do so, but it CERTAINLY isn't the fastest way
- warlock revamp: most people will disagree but it made me change classes (from my beloved vanilla lock)
- cross-realm zones: never did anything useful
- dailies dailies dailies... rewarding 150 rep each
- alterac valley revamp

also, honorable mention to:
- voice chat: if anyone remembers it...

[Tomana]

Fine, you're right, I don't give a shit how Activision came into the picture I only care that they did. It APPEARED™ as if Blizzard became more oriented towards pleasing stockholders rather than maintaining their integrity after Activision made their entrance, that was my point.

Appeared is the key word here. In my opinion, it merely coincided with the time where the management of Activision and/or Blizzard started to realize that developing huge raids no one would ever see was a bad idea. So they had to make sure the devs were no longer going full retard mode and actually make accessible content instead of sinking millions in stuff like SWP. It doesn't take a grand finance guy to realize that.

This is merely a work hypothesis, however.

[Ethas]

I cannot name specific ones but somehow removing all those funny features when you could dispell everything and such is what made this game boring. Imagine Skyrim without bugs.

[Tiberria]

For the people saying LFR, I think it was actually something that was necessary to give more casual players something to do and to let everyone be able to see the raid content at some level. I hate LFR, but I think that if it was never introduced, the subscriber numbers would be a lot lower than they currently are.

Here is my list of the 5 worst decisions.

1. Cataclysm 10/25 man combined lockouts - Just a terrible idea with two major, horrible consequences (1) Without there being a heavy incentive to run the larger raid sizes, the destruction of a majority of the larger raid guilds was accelerated and the overall raid participation levels were brought down lower than they ever would have been if they kept the Wrath model. (2) Not being able to run off night 10 man raids with friends or in achievement groups with guild members, etc just made the overall end game have so much less depth to it. This hurt the PUG scene and the overall community activity levels dramatically and was overall a huge mistake. No decision that they have ever made has accelerated the decline of the game more than this one.

2. Reduced difficulty and welfare epics - Wrath was in many ways the peak of the game and the best overall expansion. However, the one thing that Wrath did that really hurt the game going forward was reducing the overall difficulty level - of raids (except at the highest heroic level), of 5 mans, even of world mobs. On top of that was the decision to make it possible to hit max level and have a toon geared for current raiding within a couple of days by the combination of new 5 mans with higher ilvl loot than the first raiding tiers and badge gear. The problem with that decision, is they made things so easy on players that they were never able to scale it back (see Cata and the attempts to make 5 mans more difficult) without major push back from the casual majority. People ended up with a sense of entitlement from the over-accelerated Wrath model, and they have never been able to turn back from that.

3. CRZ - In theory, CRZ is a great concept to make servers feel less dead. In practice, it is a complete failure that has done more damage than good. First, you have to consider what you actually gain and lose from CRZ. You lose from having more competition for mob kills, quest drops, rare spawns, mining/herb resources, etc. All you gain is seeing more people in low level zones. It isn't like CRZ results in a more dynamic recruiting pool for raids/PvP/PUGs or a more active AH, you really only gain the feel of the zone being more populated. The downsides outweigh the positives for most people. On top of that, is the PvP server/CRZ fiasco. Yes, people chose to play on a PvP server. However, in the time from Vanilla to late Cata, the concept of what a PvP server was had shifted significantly away from the original concept. Not only were most PvP servers faction dominated, you could also generally level in and farm in low level zones without more than a minimal risk of PvP. In comes CRZ, and even leveling alts on a PvP server becomes extremely irritating. With the CRZ change, they effectively drastically changed the actual experience of what a PvP server is drastically from what was the established norm. Regardless of whether it was in the technical rulesets of the game or not, that change was not really fair to people, and they never should have done it without either implementing an opt out system or free transfers to PvE servers. I know more people that quit the game or lost all interest in trying to level alts since this change went in than any other change. It is a disaster.

4. Censor of Eternal Agony - Along with CRZ on PvP servers, I know too many people that have lost interest in the game in 5.4 because of this one item. Yes, people agree to be on PvP servers, and yes it's in a single zone that can be avoided. However, the PvP server ruleset never included the ability to grief or be griefed by your own faction. You also have to deal with the Censer if you want to use Timeless Isle, which contains most of the non-raid end zone content in 5.4. It was just a terrible idea that allows a small minority of the player base to have fun at the expense of a lot of the casual majority. All it does is piss people off and make them not want to play the game.

5. Refusal to create seperate PvE/PvP ability design - Way too often, you see classes nerfed/not get needed PvE buffs because it would cause PvP balance issues and vice versa. The only excuse that I have heard given for why they can't just make most abilities work differently in PvE vs PvP is "it would confuse players too much". The risk of people not reading tooltips is less than the negative gameplay experience that having one's spec broken for either PvE or PvP causes. They long ago should have stopped trying to balance problematic abilities across PvE/PvP and just made them work differently.

[Deleted]

Appeared is the key word here. In my opinion, it merely coincided with the time where the management of Activision and/or Blizzard started to realize that developing huge raids no one would ever see was a bad idea. So they had to make sure the devs were no longer going full retard mode and actually make accessible content instead of sinking millions in stuff like SWP. It doesn't take a grand finance guy to realize that.

This is merely a work hypothesis, however.

That's a good point and I would fully understand and agree with a decision like that. However, I don't agree with the new tradition of "force" funneling players towards new content just for the sake of improving the annual stakeholder reports, it's an ugly practise. They don't want us to enjoy anything else than the latest content and maximum level and they've gone to extreme and damaging lengths to ensure that we don't. There is nothing left in the game besides max level and the latest content. There is no game between level 1 and the latest patch anymore.

Twinking/Exploration/WPVP is gone, those communities didn't show up on any statistic so they had to go. Leveling from level 1 to max level isn't a journey as it used to be, it's been made a nuisance and we've been given every tool imaginable to make the process as quick, painless and forgettable as possible. Previous raid tiers have been made irrelevant by handing out superior gear,superior gear is literally just laying on the ground ripe for the picking. You even have the option to "watch" the latest content through LFR. And soon we're being given the option to completely opt out of leveling at all. We can just buy a character that is ready to rumble at a moment's notice.

It's so obvious what's going on. I don't understand why people don't protest against this sort of practise?!

[KoolGuyDags28]

#1 LFR
#2 Flying mounts
#3 Revamp of 1-60 zones
#4 Linear questing
#5 Heirlooms

[Osmeric]

Please reread what I said and stop being silly. In 2008, Vivendi acquired Activision.

Vivendi never acquired Activision.