WoW changed to accommodate haters

[kamuimac]

I've just read the frontpage and I'm absolutely shocked by this "design" approach. I'm referring to this:

Man, the old talent trees were the worst. The sheer number of people that would complain about class balance, about high end progression tuning, about this or that, and when we'd look into it... it'd turn out they just didn't know what they were doing. They had gone for the ultra rare 16/16/19 build, or whatever, and the reason they absolutely hated the game is because, ultimately, we let them make the wrong choices. I think the cynical response is that it's their fault and they should just know to be better if they care, but it's the game that allowed it.

It'd be real easy if everyone understood when they were making the suboptimal choices and were ok with it. That's just not how it works in practice.

What they're saying is, we had to change the game in order to accommodate those who do not know how to play, who hate the game, who make the wrong choices, who need to be spoonfed and so on. It makes a lot of sense now how those who used to love the game are so unsatisfied with the game where as the people who love the game now refer to older expansions as shit, complicated, nostalgia goggles and so on.

To me this makes no sense at all. Why would you want to change the game for people who HATE your game? Why not improve the game for the reasons people LOVE the game? Seems like a backwards design philosophy imo. But I understand that there are more people who have no interest in this game so that does make for a bigger pool of potential subscribers.

What do you think of this? To me it feels like those who truly fell in love with the game were not as important as those who were unsatisfied with it. Feels like a backstab really.

1 negative opinion has more worth then 100 positive ones thats why companies have to act if they are reciving negative opinions - its basic of busisness it has nothing to do with any change in wow in particular.

if you as customer look for new product you always check its flaws first - as for company each new customer is worth 10 times more then someone who already use their product for a long time.

[Deleted]

You should remember, that prior to this build talent trees looked like this:

As I remember at that point everything was just perfect - Blizzard had tested outdoor content and class balance and were ready to start testing raids, i.e. game was just may be a month away from release. I don't know, what happened next. Something... Something like internal conflict in dev team or something like that. May be instruction from Activision to cut budget to start saving money for future stocks buyout. But since that Beta build Blizzard completely scrapped all their previous work and started completely from scratch, that caused year long content drought, as you know. That's the turning point, when Wow started to die, cuz all changes, that have been done since that moment - are all terrible changes, that caused extreme amount of harm to the game.

'twas a beautiful thing.

[Deleted]

The point he was making went entirely over your head.

WoW never teaches you that X is better then Y in the game. Unless you actively went and tried out different talents builds and compared averages and numbers you didn't know what was good and what was bad.
Good players will try to find those answers, either they do the testing themselves or they find others who have. But 'worse' players, people who just play to have fun and not try to get the maximum out of something they don't go looking for that knowledge.

So if you have a system that allows you to make bad choices that effect your play style then people will make those wrong choices. And they wont know that their bad experience is because of their wrong choice, they will assume it is inherent in the game. And because of that they quit.

Now you can argue you should let them quit, that they are not 'worthy' but then your arguing for a game to have 10 instead of 100 players because the vast majority of gamers are not interested in min-maxing. They just wanne do their thing.

WoW didn't change to accommodate haters, WoW changed to reduce the number of bad choices you can make and allow 'lesser' players to enjoy the game as well.

- - - Updated - - -



Really? There was 1 choice. the best dps/tank/heal choice. Everything else was sub-optimal.

You enjoyed the illusion of choice. The ability to be less useful because you choice to be so or because you didn't know better.
But there was not 'more choice'.

Nope it wasnt illusion at all. Yes there was optinal builds just like are there now. But if you wanted you could create your own build or pick some less optinal but or fun for you. I was playing fire mage in PvP back in WOTLK. Try this now and you will never win single arena game. Yes old talents were better and no ,,lesser, players would not leave game just becouse they have to think what talents to pick.

Only reason why Blizzard removed choices, cutter game for casuals create all the accessibility is becoues they wanted more money. They wanted to expand wow beyond it is core playerbase and it failed hard. Blizzard lost their core playerbase what was created during vannila and TBC and even their targeted auidience (casuals) getting bored at alarming rate. Current wow desing was created in hope to bring even more players to the game and it failed.

If Blizzard would stick with their core playerbase and create game for them they would never loss 3m player in 3 months window.

[Deleted]

this apply even to talent tree, the true is even with old talent making mistakes won't gimp you to a level that make the encounter not doable that is true for the vast majority that don't go for a world first, basically people have become unable to distinguish real number from simulated one and try to min max everything.

This and other posts with similar meaning miss the point. You cannot assume that just because normal mode is only tuned for 60% "performance" by the players that the people playing it have some excess percent of performance that they can afford to lose to not min/maxing. Most of the players there only play their characters to 50-60% of their potential which is why gaining 3-4% more because of perfect enchantments, gems and talents is as important for them as it is for mythic raiders to go from 90% to 94% to kill a boss.

Optimizing your character is a free and automatic increase in performance for every player, period.


On topic:

There were more options. Of course, not many were "viable", but there were for example several different healing builds fo restoration druids in TBC that all made sense in the hands of a good player and especially for different jobs. ANd this is only for raiding. You could experiment a lot more if you didn't raid, which was a nice option.

Instead of improving that aspect for other classes/specs, Blizzard went the easy route and just gave a cookie cutter to everyone.

[Rosstafa]

I don't think he's referring to people who hate the game, just people who hated how a specific feature worked e.g. talent trees. I hated the old talent tree system. It was unecessarily complicated and people either used sub-optimal options or just copied the recommended setup from something like Icy-Veins, which entirely defeats the point of having such a highly customisable system in the first place. The new talent tree might be more limited, but in my opinion the choices are more meaningful and you're more likely to swap with different encounters, whereas that wasn't practical with the old talent tree.

Listening to negative feedback and changing to respond to it isn't 'listening to the haters', it's common sense. If enough people are complaining about a given system, you have to admit that system perhaps wasn't as well designed as you initially thought and it might be a good idea to change it.

[PetersenIV]

Listening to negative feedback and changing to respond to it isn't 'listening to the haters', it's common sense. If enough people are complaining about a given system, you have to admit that system perhaps wasn't as well designed as you initially thought and it might be a good idea to change it.

What, you mean like all the negative feedback they got about no-flying, so they decided not to implement it in WoD. Oh. Wait.

[epLe]

There was never an issue of having the one and only spec, or be massively sub-par in vanilla.

Yes there was a few "must-have" talents, like +hit or "improved main-nuke talents", but that was it.

A firemage could spec for fireball or scorch and ending up with 2 very different but both viable fire-specs.

[Rosstafa]

What, you mean like all the negative feedback they got about no-flying, so they decided not to implement it in WoD. Oh. Wait.

That was pretty much a 50/50 split. People keep saying that everyone wanted flying back, but there were just as many who thought flying shouldn't be implemented.

[dope_danny]

Unfortunately its not entirely Blizzards fault. They are following the money and unfortunately the money is with the majority and like any product ever the majority are.. kind of stupid. I dont mean that in an arrogant way but play any game that has some kind of long grind, min maxing or strategy and there will be a baseline majority that niether understand the mechanics of a game nor are they willing to learn. Its a sad case with gamers today that people dont want to learn to play a game. they want a 5 minute tutorial and then to win everything forever. They make up the majority so blizzard desgins with them in mind.

The sad part is they are growing in number now indie games were usurped by hipsters wanting walking story simulators to count as games when they lack both a challenge and a fail state. Mainstream games are hardly different. People dont want to think, they dont want challenge, they barely want story. They want a positive graphic that tells their brain to release endorphins so they feel good and a sense of accomplishment however brief it might be -case in point garrisons, for the player too lazy to leave their inn- and its getting worse.

Just a few years ago Cliff Blezinski was talking about how he made a game called 'Bulletstorm' as an attempt to break shooters out of their grim and brown molde. One of the changes was making exploding barrels green instead of red. When it was ready for focus testing the testers unanimously gave it a negative review stating a level was impossible to complete. Turned out none could pass a section where you blew up a barrel to break a wall down.
They all stared the green barrel in the face for over an hour and never even realised it was there.

Its a sad situation. Devs copy whats popular, people are trained for homogenised design and not having to think, they complain when games require independent thought and the devs change it to lower the bar.

This repeats again and again to where we are now. Everyone expects everything for nothing. Instant, masturbatory gratification and a constant feeling that they are the number one, everyone around them exists to serve and facilitate their "DING, FEEL GOOD!" experience. To the point most millenial gamers have real trouble completing games made before 2000 because they are used to interactive movies and devs constantly lowering the bar for them, creative thought and puzzle solving are alien to them. They are the majority customer now. Its not exclusively the fault of devs or customers but both in a gross symbiosis of monetary greed and lazy, bone idle players that dont want to think.

They are why damn near every game is QTE's, 30 minute cutscenes and the same shit regurgitated ad nauseum.

Sad part is this shits contagious as people stop demanding quality and acclimate to it. We all know people that used to be fans of challenge and puzzle solving that joined the "maybe i only have so much time in a day"/"sometimes i want to switch my brain off and play something" cattle ready to graze on flashing lights and a subliminal message for feel better about yourself for a few seconds like a scene from Idiocracy.


-Bar ein mind i am fully aware the default reaction is to assume im being an ego driven douchebag. I'm not. I'm just a vestigial throwback to a time when games were different to they are now and like a neurotic curmudgeon i refuse to settle for the new flesh.

But i also understand that folks like me stopped being the target for most game devs around 2008. I take what i can get but until the majority of the ME generation changes what they want the devs -all devs not just blizzard mind you- will cater to the lowest common denominator because quite simply they number the largest and thus are where the steadiest income lies.

[PetersenIV]

That was pretty much a 50/50 split. People keep saying that everyone wanted flying back, but there were just as many who thought flying shouldn't be implemented.

Yeah. 50/50 split. That's why pro-flying threads were rated so highly. And Pro-Anti-flying threads were buried within minutes of posting. Right.

[Lenarific]

Blizzard is so full of shit

[Asrialol]

What they're saying is

Stopped reading there. It's funny, you're one of those people Blizzard recently talked about.

[bufferunderrun]

This and other posts with similar meaning miss the point. You cannot assume that just because normal mode is only tuned for 60% "performance" by the players that the people playing it have some excess percent of performance that they can afford to lose to not min/maxing. Most of the players there only play their characters to 50-60% of their potential which is why gaining 3-4% more because of perfect enchantments, gems and talents is as important for them as it is for mythic raiders to go from 90% to 94% to kill a boss.

Optimizing your character is a free and automatic increase in performance for every player, period.

no it's not 3/4% is nothing and unless you go for a world first you not need to change talent every encounter, reroll a profession or farm lfr for that trinket that give you 1% more than the one you have, that is the point.
Worst of all blizzard giving to much credit to the complainers ruined those thing, look at what they have done to professions just because some idiot feel forced to switch tailoring for bs cuz Brusalsk in it's guide on mmo-c say you can gain 1%111111!!!!1!

[Shuji V2]

Stopped reading there. It's funny, you're one of those people Blizzard recently talked about.

Thank you for your solid contribution.

[Deleted]

Catering to a more casual audience has been a thing since Vanilla beta. And it really started to a larger degree towards the end of TBC and WoTLK added to it. The beginning of Cata returned us to harder heroic dungeons though so... not sure WTF you're talking about lol

There's a difference between catering to casual gamers & catering to the lowest common denominator in 2015's market. I suggest you research into what 'casual' meant back in Vanilla beta.

[Grummgug]

The point he was making went entirely over your head.

WoW never teaches you that X is better then Y in the game. Unless you actively went and tried out different talents builds and compared averages and numbers you didn't know what was good and what was bad. Good players will try to find those answers, either they do the testing themselves or they find others who have. But 'worse' players, people who just play to have fun and not try to get the maximum out of something they don't go looking for that knowledge.

So if you have a system that allows you to make bad choices that effect your play style then people will make those wrong choices. And they wont know that their bad experience is because of their wrong choice, they will assume it is inherent in the game. And because of that they quit.

Now you can argue you should let them quit, that they are not 'worthy' but then your arguing for a game to have 10 instead of 100 players because the vast majority of gamers are not interested in min-maxing. They just wanna do their thing.

I trade stocks and options in the stock market, and what you describe here can easily apply to trading stocks. There ARE in fact effective choices you can make to profit. But traders are also free to make wrong choices too. Some traders wont know that their bad experience is because of their wrong choices, they will assume it is inherent in Wall Street. And because of that, they quit (and then start blaming corporations for everything).

So you get bad traders or people who know bad traders and they start complaining about how the system sucks. And then you get politicians who leech onto that emotion and get themselves elected based on misconceptions. And then the politicians who the people turned to start actually breaking the system that was working all along.

[Deleted]

Why would I research it? To me, it pretty much meant anyone involved in playing WoW while I sat and poked fun at them for not playing EQ

The biggest difference people need to make is between what an actual casual player is and what a bad player is. One is not the other, no matter how much a bad player tells you he/she is just a casual.

The definition of casual changed from them (potentially) being bad players who aspired to get better, to them (again, potentially) being bad players who expect Blizzard to tear down any existing form of challenge/effort-based systems that stand in their way, in the name of instant gratification for them.

When you value a market, whereby that market's retention depends on the game being entirely dumbed down to suit them, what the game originally had on offer is only going to be sullied, and it has continually followed that trend into WoD.

I have to wonder what EQ players back then, in the early 2000s, would've thought of WoD first-hand, and what words they would've resorted to, to describe the people who bought and championed this expansion. One thing's for sure, it certainly wouldn't have been as friendly and passive as 'casual'.

[Jibjub]

Archeage did talent trees really well (and many more things oh so terribly). WoW is just so simple in its roles that in the name of balance the talent trees need to be useless. More complex combat (not action combat and not fight mechanics) would help talent trees be more useful because their would be more diverse specs and therefore more diverse encounters. If most encounters amount to "stay out of fire, do lots of DPS" then of course folks are going to min/max. Diversity = opportunities for choice. Blizzard decided on simplicity instead.

- - - Updated - - -

Combat diversity and also just game diversity are important. The more things there are to do in a game means there are more things for certain specs to be good at. Blizzard just had raiding and therefore limits the number of unique specs and therefore limits choice.

[Sanguinerd]

You just don't get it OP.. you just don't get it.

And to say people who complain "don't know how to play" is another bullshit thing people like you have gotten too used to saying.

[Goradan]

I've just read the frontpage and I'm absolutely shocked by this "design" approach. I'm referring to this:

Man, the old talent trees were the worst. The sheer number of people that would complain about class balance, about high end progression tuning, about this or that, and when we'd look into it... it'd turn out they just didn't know what they were doing. They had gone for the ultra rare 16/16/19 build, or whatever, and the reason they absolutely hated the game is because, ultimately, we let them make the wrong choices. I think the cynical response is that it's their fault and they should just know to be better if they care, but it's the game that allowed it.

It'd be real easy if everyone understood when they were making the suboptimal choices and were ok with it. That's just not how it works in practice.

What they're saying is, we had to change the game in order to accommodate those who do not know how to play, who hate the game, who make the wrong choices, who need to be spoonfed and so on. It makes a lot of sense now how those who used to love the game are so unsatisfied with the game where as the people who love the game now refer to older expansions as shit, complicated, nostalgia goggles and so on.

To me this makes no sense at all. Why would you want to change the game for people who HATE your game? Why not improve the game for the reasons people LOVE the game? Seems like a backwards design philosophy imo. But I understand that there are more people who have no interest in this game so that does make for a bigger pool of potential subscribers.

What do you think of this? To me it feels like those who truly fell in love with the game were not as important as those who were unsatisfied with it. Feels like a backstab really.

I get what you mean. Wow no longer appeals to people that want to or are dedicated to a MMORPG. I mean. the people that play now are toxic as fuck and will leave at the drop of a hat. Blizz is paying the price for attempting to please such people that don't give a rat's ass about the game, the lore and socialising etc. Not to mentions that the devs that made WoW a hit have left the team, leaving unqualified idiots in the position what have no clue that World of Warcraft is! Better to have a few million players that are dedicated than to have 10 million at the start and then have none in the end. The total mismanagement of the game is what has made me play on private servers.