Why has Blizzard abandoned quality in favour of popularity and attracting kids?

[Zvezdichko]

And immediately disclaimer after placing the provocative title (so you will be interesting in opening the thread):

There's NOTHING wrong with being serious AND to attract kids. We've seen great efforts in fiction in that regard. Like Harry Potter, for example.

So the question is: Why has Blizzard abandoned quality in favor of popularity? Can't it be just both?

Apparently, they don't care...

Years ago, when I started playing WoW, I was attracted by the huge and open fantasy world. It felt alive. It felt real. It felt immersive. It certainly had an amount of pop-culture references, but it could pass as serious as other grand high fantasy settings. After all, it already had its amount of books published. Even before WoW, there were Warcraft books.

However, it definitely feels like Blizzard has forgotten what Warcraft is about. As a fantasy writer myself, I've always expected sequels of other fiction with great anticipation. Sometimes they disappoint me, sometimes they don't.

As for World of Warcraft.

First, we got pandas. Instead of getting an expansion about storyline continuation - Aszhara, Turalyon and Alleria, the situation in Kul'Tiras, we got an expansion focused on an April fools joke. Blizzard responded: don't worry guys, it's fantasy, we know what we're doing. This didn't help, and they admitted the expansion was about the Alliance vs Horde and storming Orgrimmar. Players voiced their concerns that we won't be satisfied because the Alliance gets nothing after this. Blizzard didn't listen and the patches rolled around with our worst fears fulfilled.

Then we got Warlords of Draenor time screw. An advice: if you want to write time fiction, DON'T do that UNLESS you know what you're doing. That's why there are so few famous time fiction writers compared to other subgenres. You either do it properly or screw it massively. Christie Golden failed miserably before with that recent Thrall book. Blizzard responded: Oh, the situation is not like that. This is not our Draenor, it's alternative one, but with same characters. Look how awesome it's going to be.

And here we are.

We're several months after the expansion got released. And what have we got so far?

We've got Facebook Farmville AKA Garrison.

And the stupid selfie camera.

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?????????????????????????

For weeks i've been expecting how the storyline will unfold. I've been expecting a new WoW novel. There's no one. There won't be one a year after War Crimes.

Instead, people walk around and take stupid selfies.

Where's did they left the quality?

[Stonecloak]

dude, there's selfies in the game. It's over, wow is never coming back.

[Deleted]

Cause the people who claim no content are hardcore casuals who do not want mythic raiding / guild / group play with challenge.
They love questing alone, daily questing alone, crafting and farming alone while drifting through their memories of when random people would ask you to join for certain quests because they couldn't solo them. They dream of the days when the spent 6+ hours in BRD and still up to this day think that's normal and superior over the current state. QoL patches and changes won't affect them because they never ever will care about wrong/bad play styles. Could rant over these threads for hours but please...

[whynotchris]

Honestly, yeah, they're working on catering to an audience they hadn't before. Historically, WoW would've had a rather limited audience. When its sub's peaked, it was the hands-down best MMO operating.

Now, yeah they need to attract new crowds. A lot of their old-school audience is getting into important things...like children and careers.

The more new players they attract = the more money they make = the better content we get.

Ignore features you don't care about and reap the benefits of attracting new people in a new age of MMO's.

[Deleted]

What blizzard NEEDS to survive with wow in the long term is attracting a younger audience. Most people who play since vanilla actually grew up, got a job, got a life, got friends, girlfriends (boyfriends), kids by now. I am 25 and find about 10min/day to play at most and a few hours in the weekends. I simply cannot dedicate time to a game i pay as much money as someone else for and don't get proper content anymore because my lack of time. This is why blizzard starts casualizing the whole game.

Starting to draw in a younger generation that still has time to do raids every 2 nights, that can understand the humor in adding real world items to the game (selfie, twitter). It's just how things goes and you can't do anything about it.

[taliey]

And how do you objectively measure said 'quality?'

All assertions of quality inevitably relate to how people feel about said subject.

Feelings aren't a really convincing argument to sway minds after all.

[Stonecloak]

What blizzard NEEDS to survive with wow in the long term is attracting a younger audience. Most people who play since vanilla actually grew up, got a job, got a life, got friends, girlfriends (boyfriends), kids by now. I am 25 and find about 10min/day to play at most and a few hours in the weekends. I simply cannot dedicate time to a game i pay as much money as someone else for and don't get proper content anymore because my lack of time. This is why blizzard starts casualizing the whole game.

Starting to draw in a younger generation that still has time to do raids every 2 nights, that can understand the humor in adding real world items to the game (selfie, twitter). It's just how things goes and you can't do anything about it.

Those people play candy crush and cod. Their targeting the wrong crowd. Mmo's are niche and always have been.

[ponies]

I left wow for league of legends 2 months ago. I never though I would say this but league of legends is a way better gaming experience. at least from a pvp perspective. This season pvp has been the worst its ever been in wow

[Khorm]

Cause the people who claim no content are hardcore casuals who do not want mythic raiding / guild / group play with challenge.
They love questing alone, daily questing alone, crafting and farming alone while drifting through their memories of when random people would ask you to join for certain quests because they couldn't solo them. They dream of the days when the spent 6+ hours in BRD and still up to this day think that's normal and superior over the current state. QoL patches and changes won't affect them because they never ever will care about wrong/bad play styles. Could rant over these threads for hours but please...

Pin point.

[Zvezdichko]

Honestly, yeah, they're working on catering to an audience they hadn't before. Historically, WoW would've had a rather limited audience. When its sub's peaked, it was the hands-down best MMO operating.

Now, yeah they need to attract new crowds. A lot of their old-school audience is getting into important things...like children and careers.

The more new players they attract = the more money they make = the better content we get.

Ignore features you don't care about and reap the benefits of attracting new people in a new age of MMO's.

This.

I agree.

And some people like me have turned over to more mature MMORPGs lore-wise, like Lord of the Rings Online.

I hate modern trends...

It's everywhere... Starting with Peter Jackson screwing up the last Hobbit, continuing with modern game reboots (like Thief), and changing existing previously good games (like WoW) for worse...

[Kaleredar]

Why do you start topics with titles that suppose a conclusion that many people don't agree with?

[Zvezdichko]

And how do you objectively measure said 'quality?'

All assertions of quality inevitably relate to how people feel about said subject.

Feelings aren't a really convincing argument to sway minds after all.

No.

We're talking about ART.

Leo Tolstoy wrote in "What is art?" that art shouldn't be equated to people's feelings. Good art is not necessary the popular art. There are so many movies/books/games that get initially popular, but they got forgotten after that. Good art may get initially popular, yes, but it remains after that.

What I wrote in my thread is that... World of Warcraft had such a huge potential and everything is going to waste.

Which makes me sad... Yes, there could have been nothing wrong with selfies, if Blizzard cared about the quality of content, which they don't.

[Deleted]

I think they were always doing it, we just got older so the "kids" changed.

[IIamaKing]

Cause the people who claim no content are hardcore casuals who do not want mythic raiding / guild / group play with challenge.
They love questing alone, daily questing alone, crafting and farming alone while drifting through their memories of when random people would ask you to join for certain quests because they couldn't solo them. They dream of the days when the spent 6+ hours in BRD and still up to this day think that's normal and superior over the current state. QoL patches and changes won't affect them because they never ever will care about wrong/bad play styles. Could rant over these threads for hours but please...

So 98% of the player base.

[Deleted]

Hey, remember when they started selling those mogging helmets in the store? Remember how the game was literally going to collapse in on itself and you couldn't wait for Wildstar to come and liberate us all from Blizzard's corporate bullshit and bring back QUALITY and THINGS to the entire MMO genre?

Oh wait, you probably forgot. And you'll forget about this.

[Anium]

The old player base is dying (too old and too involved with rl to play like before), they need to attract new players to keep the popularity, hence selfie cam...or well WoW would die. Kind of that simple.

[Evelyn]

Isn't the answer clear?

Money

They know the game is slowly dying, instead of fighting it, they've pretty much given up and resorted to this out of desperation. Yeah or you could say it's just the usual Actiblizz behavior.

[OneTripleZero]

First, we got pandas. Instead of getting an expansion about storyline continuation - Aszhara, Turalyon and Alleria, the situation in Kul'Tiras, we got an expansion focused on an April fools joke.

And the wheels fly off your argument. If you can't see how well MoP was put together lorewise and storywise, then you're no fantasy writer. There's no other way I can say it. MoP was one of the tightest expansions they've had. Everything from the continent itself to the Sha to the Mantid, everything has its place in existing lore and meshes right in. Unlike the Draenei and the Worgen, the Pandaren didn't have to be retconned in with a gigantic narrative shoehorn. The supporting cast was compelling and well written. If it weren't for everyone's emotional investment in Arthas, I'd say it had a better storyline than Wrath, and that's saying something.

[Deleted]

This.

I agree.

And some people like me have turned over to more mature MMORPGs lore-wise, like Lord of the Rings Online.

I hate modern trends...

It's everywhere... Starting with Peter Jackson screwing up the last Hobbit, continuing with modern game reboots (like Thief), and changing existing previously good games (like WoW) for worse...

A big reason for the lowering of difficulty is due to games becoming more mass market.

This is going to sound horrible but to take a great George Carlin quote "Think of how dumb the average person is. Half of people are even dumber than that."

Waaay back at the start of the tech boom, more or less the only people who were using computers/were online in any great numbers were people higher up the IQ scale. Therefore the entertainment they sought was fairly cerebral. That IQ scale was also heavily weighted towards being good with numbers, liking logic problems etc This was the golden age of the RPG/puzzler. Even relatively gamer friendly fantasy stuff like baldurs gate, morrowind and wow had arcane number and ruling systems lifted from D+D to power the underlying gameplay.

Your average person probably hasn't done any math except maybe to get a mortgage or count how much they spent shopping since they left school and they hate even doing that much.

So games are getting dumber and dumber to match the actual cognitive skills of the people likely to be playing and paying for them. i.e. stupid folks. What stupid folks like is action adventure and dancing style reaction puzzles. So that's what modern games are, for the most part. if you want the old style stuff it's there, but it's niche. (Play darkest dungeon or divinity OS, btw if you want the old style thinking mans gaming).

Wows raids used to have a heavy element of getting the right stats in the background, resists and such. Now they are synchronised dancing puzzles. yes, numbers help enormously, but being able to dance is much more important.

TL;DR you are never going to see armor penetration again.

[Zvezdichko]

Cause the people who claim no content are hardcore casuals who do not want mythic raiding / guild / group play with challenge.
They love questing alone, daily questing alone, crafting and farming alone while drifting through their memories of when random people would ask you to join for certain quests because they couldn't solo them. They dream of the days when the spent 6+ hours in BRD and still up to this day think that's normal and superior over the current state. QoL patches and changes won't affect them because they never ever will care about wrong/bad play styles. Could rant over these threads for hours but please...

How could have I missed this comment?

Normal/Heroic/Mythic raids versus Casual/LFR/Formerly Flexible Raid does feel like new content, but it's NOT new content.

It's still the same bosses, but with increased difficulty.

According to me and many people who're dissatisfied, what we want exactly is new content, in every sense of the word. New storyline, new quests, new raid...