Legion Developer Update

[Deleted]

Really? Leveling is in bad state? They are like 6-7 years too late for that.

Leveling has been in ruins since middle of WoTLK, since heirlooms made their appearance and developers in their infinite wisdom decided that leveling was too hard and went through it with massive nerf bat. It was single player experience void of any MMO and RPG aspects since Cataclysm when all handholding and phasing started. Leveling dungeons have been in ruins since they were nerfed and split for LFD crowd. People not being able to finish stories in Cataclysm zones? It was like that since Cataclysm.

At least they finally admit that something is wrong. But it is probably too late - people who were interested in MMO and RPG aspects of game are long gone.

[Bepples]

First of all not 2.4 - 2.4.3. I remember this patch very clearly, cause mounts became lvl 30. Second, WoW started loosing subscribers right after Ulduar, and then had its historical maximum at the start of cataclysm.

People are not unsubing the moment smth changes; they start unsubing when they grow sick of this changes. It's not one day process.

When I said "go do some research before you spread blatant misinformation", I meant you should actually go google this shit instead of relying on your memory, because the latter is a clear mistake.

http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_2.4.0

Patch 2.4.0. Please note the enormous amount of nerfs in the Dungeons and Raids section...INCLUDING the removal of attunements for Hyjal, Black Temple, and Karazhan. SSC and TK had their attunements removed in an earlier patch. Evidently you do not remember this patch as clearly as you think you do.

Even if it WERE 2.4.3, that patch released on 15th of July 2008. The subscriber count around that time was just under 11 million. WoW subscribers would reach their peak at the end of WotLK with 12 million.

No source at all demonstates any subscriber loss in WotLK besides the brief shutdown of WoW in China, so your second claim is wrong too.

As for your last; you are claiming that catch-up mechanisms that first showed up in the first quarter of 2008 have a staggered effect and thus didn't affect subscriber counts until the first quarter of 2011? You seriously are trying to argue that people just stuck around for an entire expansion and then some if they hated the removal of forced progression so much?

[furydeath]

oh snap i got in. least ih ave somethign to do now.

[victorvndoom]

Really? Leveling is in bad state? They are like 6-7 years too late for that.

Leveling has been in ruins since middle of WoTLK, since heirlooms made their appearance and developers in their infinite wisdom decided that leveling was too hard and went through it with massive nerf bat. It was single player experience void of any MMO and RPG aspects since Cataclysm when all handholding and phasing started. Leveling dungeons have been in ruins since they were nerfed and split for LFD crowd. People not being able to finish stories in Cataclysm zones? It was like that since Cataclysm.

At least they finally admit that something is wrong. But it is probably too late - people who were interested in MMO and RPG aspects of game are long gone.

he said they know that there is a problem in leveling at the moment because they never adressed the issues, hopely they dont take 10 years to fix the damage of non expanding and bring out patches that fixes the leveling. Maybe because they changed talents in cataclysm they should have adressed leveling and they did in the starter zones

[Deleted]

So the pace is where it should be? So outlvling an area, before you are even close to finishing the zone-storyline is alright? Right now, the leveling experience is broken and even if you try to handicap yourself(no looms, nothing to help you lvl), you still outlvl zones before you are really done with them. It gives a crappy experience as both new and old players, since the paceing is so bad.

Since you have lvled so many characters, i understand why you don't really want to do the lvling content anymore, but aint that also a call to make the lvling experience fun again? To have it change into something new and, maybe, exiting? I personally was pretty done with lvling when Cata hit, yet the revamped zones really made me like lvling again. Don't you think a completly new lvling system would reignite that lost lvling flame?

What is broken isn't that the current leveling is too fast but rather that every expansion increase the level cap. In those conditions blizzard had to reduce the amount of time needed to reach the level cap, as the true game begins there since TBC release (as the pre expansion content as always been forsaken by blizzard at each expansion release).

If they increased the amount of time needed to reach the cap it would just make the leveling experience even more boring as it is now (boring content is boring, the fact that you ll complete it slower won't make it any better, that's not because the leveling is slow that people like vanilla), even though I suspect it is an attempt by blizzard to increase sales of character boost.

[TwilightAss]

When I said "go do some research before you spread blatant misinformation", I meant you should actually go google this shit instead of relying on your memory, because the latter is a clear mistake.

http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_2.4.0

Patch 2.4.0. Please note the enormous amount of nerfs in the Dungeons and Raids section...INCLUDING the removal of attunements for Hyjal, Black Temple, and Karazhan. SSC and TK had their attunements removed in an earlier patch.

You could not even read, jesus. "Karazhan Players will no longer need the [Master’s Key] to enter Karazhan. The gates to Karazhan will still require the Master's Key to be unlocked." You still needed at least one attuned player to enter raid. And the sole reason they've removed attunements for Hyjal and black temple, cause all 3 raids dropped tier 6 pieces.

[Deleted]

Define "normally", because the alpha for every single version of WoW has been available to friends/family at the very least.

Normally as in the actual meaning in software developement.
What it means in 2016 for a video game is very different from that.

[Deleted]

When I said "go do some research before you spread blatant misinformation", I meant you should actually go google this shit instead of relying on your memory, because the latter is a clear mistake.

http://wowwiki.wikia.com/wiki/Patch_2.4.0

*snip*

Do you know how many players raided? Tiny minority. Nerfs to raids were irrelevant to them. Raid catch ups, raid attunements are all irrelevant.

Vast majority of players were happy exploring world, slowly leveling professions, doing dungeons (not hardcore way), doing some battlegrounds. When they got tired of playing end game, they spent months leveling another character. Those were casual players that formed majority of player base.

Raids were always past time for minority. Leveling and world is what mattered to most players.

[risingforce]

First, WoW was never casual compared to other MMOs, it just gave different experience. Second, WoW started bleeding subscribers, the moment blizzard changed their design philosophy from "all content is relevant, and cool rewards go to better players" to "only latest content is relevant, and most cool rewards are available to everybody". Just watch this https://youtu.be/Falm0H7VEiQ

Nice video! But...

I think the biggest problem with players (and yes, it is with players) is perception; I mean, too many people look back (remember, they're looking back) and saying "the game caters to casuals" or "the game is too easy", but the fact is that the game currently has more to do than ever and at the highest levels of difficulty the game is more challenging than ever.

The demographic has also grown up -literally grown up -we are all 10 years older and (for folks like me) a lot older if you count back to when Warcraft was released! So the game doesn't pander to "casuals" or whatever you call it, rather the game's philosophy has changed -cool rewards are still out there, if you look at it objectively (Purple !== Cool).

Also, everyone needs to realise that "bleeding subscribers" is (1) natural growth decay in every Expansion (2) natural growth decay in a long term game (3) also offset by the WoW Token numbers. That 'natual growth decay' is inherent in any large complex system, and in this system it is literally the fact that (i) less people play MMOs these days -MOBAs, Mobile only, etc (ii) the subscription model is a very old system and an obstacle to a lot of young players and finally (iii) the WoW player will almost always -with time -find they have less time than they'd like to play WoW and then (iii.i) enjoy the game less and (iii.ii) quit. All in, these are obstacles the game's 'philosophy' has to evolve with, and not combat; time's change, so do the players.

It's sad that some people don't see the changes, and that they want the 'old systems' but honestly that is literally the power of nostalgia.

I do have faults with WoW (as a player and professional observer) -namely that the game is a very bad solo experience, and that the player needs a Guild to make the most of the game.

[Ellessandra]

Jesse. Turn your fucking mic down will ya? Holy shit. lol

[kamuimac]

It's so sad to see how people react to changes to leveling as "Ugh! Why does it have to take longer, it's boring!" when a big factor in why it's so boring is because you could be in a coma and still hit level 100 in 2 days. It's embarassing. Try to see the reason you find leveling boring instead of advocating it to remain what it is.

its boring becasue half of playerbase have 20 + max level alts and leveling next ones makes them vomit from boredom - making the process longer wont help all it will make will prevent people from leveling and force then to buy char boosts - blizzard should ive and option then - they make leveling process slower ? ok but put on heirloom extra 0 aka instead 5-10 % make it 50-100% boosts for those who choose to level like we did for past 6 years.

this will end up in levelin zones being completly abandoned - complete fail design and stupid attempt to please pro legacy crowd.

[Shudder]

Leveling is fine, in fact it should be faster. They need to stop listening to these legacy twats that want slower leveling. They're an extremely whiny vocal minority. Cater to them and watch Blizz have as many players as a private server.

[Cthulhu 2020]

So... cue the "No beta club" sigs.

Sigh.

[apelsinjuice]

How do you know that? There are more than enough altoholics out there. If you don't want to level fast - fine, don't use heirlooms etc. Stay in a zone if you want to finish it before moving on. Honestly, people like you behave like spoiled children or some religious dogmatics. WoW got so big because it was that casual!

Oh really? WoW was big in vanilla, tbc and wotlk when levling was slow, no LFR no dungeon finder, every time they made it more casual subs started dropping and now its probably below 3 mil.

[TheLimonTree]

But it's not visible, the shields are an iconic visual for the shaman class..., well I don't understand the removal of active buffing either, and as of yet the devs didn't bother to explain why that was necessary at all...

Edit: or to sell it to us as an improvement....

eh, the visual effect could easily be added as a glyph now that there's no limit.

[MasterHamster]

its boring becasue half of playerbase have 20 + max level alts and leveling next ones makes them vomit from boredom - making the process longer wont help all it will make will prevent people from leveling and force then to buy char boosts - blizzard should ive and option then - they make leveling process slower ? ok but put on heirloom extra 0 aka instead 5-10 % make it 50-100% boosts for those who choose to level like we did for past 6 years.

this will end up in levelin zones being completly abandoned - complete fail design and stupid attempt to please pro legacy crowd.

And since when are the people with 10-20 maxlevel characters supposed to set the bar in how quickly they should be able to get yet another alt to max?

Wanting leveling to feel interesting and part of the game again doesn't make me a legacy advocate. It means I want to feel like the path to level 100 is engaging. Leveling hasn't felt interesting in many years and yes a big reason for that is that I CAN. NOT. DIE. I don't notice my character become stronger because I am already oneshotting everything by default. How is THAT any fun?

I barely feel any connection to my characters because I don't need to put in any substantial effort to hit max level.

And no, they do not need to compensate all of it because the very reason leveling has become this joke is because of slow changes over the years slowballing with characters becoming more and more powerful by default.

If you make leveling 10 times faster than it used to be, over a long period of time, why do they have to compensate everything that follows changes that is supposed to make leveling feel less of a rush to max. Talk about a toxic development environment where every change that "boosts" players in some way is expected to always remain that way. Kinda like when something is boosted by 50% on a PTR then changed to maybe a 30% buff instead, and that class starts yelling that Blizzard wants their spec to remain in the gutter.

Like god damn, try to keep the wider picture in sight.

Leveling is fine, in fact it should be faster. They need to stop listening to these legacy twats that want slower leveling. They're an extremely whiny vocal minority. Cater to them and watch Blizz have as many players as a private server.

Trying to explain to people why endlessly snowballing faster leveling is bad for enjoyment is utterly impossible.
Kinda like people arguing why entire raid rosters getting geared in 2-3 resets is a bad thing, are accused of just wanting to artificially prolong content.

[TyrannicalPuppy]

http://us.battle.net/wow/character/malganis/Gurgthock/

Doubt this is Ion. He has Elemental as off spec...... YOU CANT PLAY SOMETHING FOR 12 YEARS AND TOTALLY NOT GET THE CORE PROBLEMS. This level of stupid is impossible.

- - - Updated - - -



November 2015.

Ion isn't the class designer. He's the raid / dungeon designer. Celestalon is the class designer.

[Deleted]

I think Ion should just have said..if you dont like then leave.We are doing what we want to and end of story..if it works it works if not,its not.Buissnes as ussual.

Why evenisten to the community..they nerrfed the cata expansion last time they listen to them.

Just stick to ur guns Blizz.End of story.

[Flurryfang]

What is broken isn't that the current leveling is too fast but rather that every expansion increase the level cap. In those conditions blizzard had to reduce the amount of time needed to reach the level cap, as the true game begins there since TBC release (as the pre expansion content as always been forsaken by blizzard at each expansion release).

If they increased the amount of time needed to reach the cap it would just make the leveling experience even more boring as it is now (boring content is boring, the fact that you ll complete it slower won't make it any better, that's not because the leveling is slow that people like vanilla), even though I suspect it is an attempt by blizzard to increase sales of character boost.

I will agree, that the problem has a root in the always increasing level cap. Having to always comprimise the lvling speed, because there are more lvls to get, has been a bad solution from blizzards side.

Well, i am not advocating sololy for a slowed lvling experience, i just see it as one of the solutions to the current problem. Alone, the slowed leveling speed would not really do much with the enjoyment of leveling, only fix the problem with paceing in the zones. What could really fix it all, is to implement the scaling tec in all zones in the game. Not having to worry about overleveling content, while still keeping the current speed of lvling. It would proberly even speed it up a bit, since you would not have to travel that much, to find relevant content.

All in all, i don't really care about how fast they can make it, i just care about how good the experience can be, if you really want to enjoy it. That is why something like more heirloom gear or more exp potions are implemented, just aslong as the experience of leveling a no-help character is still enjoyable.... Which in my opnion, is not the right thing to call it right now.

[TyrannicalPuppy]

no they did not... it was still suppost to release augest, they were hoping for a long beta, but beta is ussauly polished and mostly finished, so they named it alpha... it was never ment to be Q1, beta came out in the following weeks like they said, but was called "Alpha" since it was still missing alot of stuff

Source? /10char