What does Blizzard need to do to rescue BFA?

[Mafic]

Posts like these have become such a dime a dozen.. it's pointless to keep posting them yet people can't help themselves.

You offer almost no solutions just more questions.

Actually solutions were provided.

The key to understand is that it takes more players speaking up. Keep posting these threads my fellow gaming friends.

[Drusin]

Only time i hear this xpac is bad is when i come to these forums.

Now I'm curious what server you play on, how long you play and if you have /4 on.

[Queen of Hamsters]

Nothing. Just gotta release content at a regular pace like legion and there good if you ask me.

Pretty much.

And seeing as how design philosophies of Legion carried over into BfA, I'd say that's a pretty done deal.

[Moozart]

A month into the expansion, I'm spending most of my time chasing achievements in previous expansions. While I'm not pushing max ilvl nor running mythic heroics yet, its merely because the content is just so tedious and boring. There's no 'pull' into the BFA content.

Thinking about the game, I'd say there's 4 or 5 big 'misses' for BFA that destine it to be worse than WoD in the pantheon of WoW expansions.

1) There's little to do.
Yes you can chase dailies. Most people are chasing a single emissary quest daily, as the rep gain for dailies themselves are small otherwise. Its the same as Legion but there's no Class Halls, the mission talbe is incredble barren, azerite is just a grind vs artifact weapons (skins, unlocks etc), and expeditions are destined to be worse than Pandaria scenarios in terms of interest.

2) Dungeons are poor
Fights aren't particularly interesting, there's no gripping stories, and they've seemed to overdose on trash.

3) Azerite is a bad system
Its artificial progression, and contributing to two problems: a) gear upgrades are now seem as new work (as opposed to wow! new loot!), and b) Legion removed the need for multiple sets, for BFA to require multiple sets for gear abilities.

4) Island hoping is a chore.
Many of the WQ seem to be designed to encourage island hoping to get your limit, but unless you're playing Warmode its just a headache. I feel badly for alliance though...their zones seem particularly bland and uninspired.

5) Class balance is horrible, and mechanics are boring
Homogenization and GCD changes make this game more boring to play than ever. 15 years ago hotkey MMOs were cutting edge; in the modern era they're slow. Making them more mundane has hurt the player experience. Sub rogues, shadow priests, feral druids, any mage spec but frost, any warlock spec but destruc, ... all horrible. ret paladin is powerful but boring AF to play. Huge degrade in the player experience since 8.0.

Subjectively, I'd say the zone designs are worse (even if the art design is top notch). Bigger zones means leveling takes forever... I got 5 levels out of Volduun for example. The music is uninspired, and sadly the theme music for login is ALSO the theme music for Zandalar. I'm sick of the theme already a month in.

So how does Blizzard fix this? Patch 8.1 is already set in stone. I doubt it will hold people past October/November... warfronts are questionable interest given the beta response, and raiding is raiding. Hopefully its a *good* raid, but that remains to be seen.

Some thoughts:

- Major revamp of Azerite needs to happen. Allow selection of unlocked abilities; remove the 'oh shit i got a gear upgrade too bad i can't use it fully yet' game design penalty. I'd get rid of Azerite gear altogether -- make them glyphs or unlocks you can apply to gear based on azerite level of your heart of azeroth would be one possibility. Its likely going to go down as the worst design mechanic ever implemented in a WoW expansion; back in the day Blizzard killed Path of the titans late in the expansion (and wisely!), they didn't have the cojones to do it this time around.
- I'm sick of mission tables in general, but certainly the Champion Halls had more variety of quests and phases. Need to make these relevant somehow. BFA's premise (Horde vs Alliance) is paper thin after Cata/WoD/Legion, but they need to do ~something~ story wise. An option to be able to kill Nathanos Blightcaller would be welcome, putting a smug / arrogant NPC infront of your dailies for 2 years was poorly thought out.
- Class revamps have to happen, and *fast*. Raiding will only expose liabilities even more to poor specs. Its probably too late to go back on GCD and ability homogenization, but the tedious process of class monitoring is taking way too long.
- Need to implement alt friendly mechanics to keep people playing. The rep grinds, mission tables, lack of flying, etc make leveling alts a huge undertaking. As it stands, i can't be bothered to bring anything other than my main to the level cap and gear. This is ok in an exciting expansion; in this expansion alts will be the way they keep the economy and groups alive.

I'm not sure what else can be done, given development lead times and internal roadmaps committed years in advance. But BFA is going to have a huge dropoff in the next few months if things are sorted fast.

Thoughts? What would you do -- within the realm of reason -- to fix this expansion?

Thanks for letting us know it was in need of rescue because I CLEARLY wasn't aware of that. Quite honestly the only place I see complaining is on forums, i do not see hardly any complaints on server at all.

If you think its so bad maybe wow just isn't for you anymore and its time for you to move on?

Now I'm curious what server you play on, how long you play and if you have /4 on.

Area 52 and /4 is always on

[Mafic]

Posts like these have become such a dime a dozen.. it's pointless to keep posting them yet people can't help themselves.

You offer almost no solutions just more questions.




How about no? Just because someone is a major streamer does not mean they have the same intrests at heart as everyone else does.

Not to mention they play in their little bubble of asskissery that's not even close to the reality everyone else has to play through.

Streamers shouldn't even get preferential treatment when it comes to beta invites to begin with.

Major streamers love them or hate them actually are a net positive. Without sodapoppin's help Feral would be in a dark place right now. While the influence of WoW streamers is questionable for overall health of the game I realize they are still necessary outlet for positive changes to the game IMO.

[Mafic]

Thanks for letting us know it was in need of rescue because I CLEARLY wasn't aware of that. Quite honestly the only place I see complaining is on forums, i do not see hardly any complaints on server at all.

If you think its so bad maybe wow just isn't for you anymore and its time for you to move on?

Actually the complaints are worse in WoW reddit at the moment and official forums. Normally official forums are busy talking about high elves but when the general discussion forum goers actually start talking about the flaws of BFA's game design that is when you know something is off. Just my two copper cents. Thanks!

[Doctor Funkenstein]

It's sad that the only truly fun thing to happen in-game since BfA was released was the Trial of Style... and that's rehashed content that didn't even include anything new this year. Which is pretty indicative of what Blizzard does with the game now.

Admittedly, the zones and leveling quests were pretty entertaining (save for some zones/areas), but that's about as shallow a praise as you can give something like an MMO.

They really need to get it out of their fucking heads that the only thing that matters is gearing up and instead focus on making the game FUN with INTERESTING shit to do. It doesn't all have to be some obsessive gear hunt just so the 0.001% of the playerbase who gives a flying fuck about "world firsts" can peacock around for the 5 minutes afterwards and then are completely forgotten about by everyone else.

[Sarkol]

After playing for weeks and enjoying myself, when the big content isn't even out yet, coming to the forums is like entering a different reality.

[Mafic]

1. Undo the vast majority of GCD changes
2. Fix the talent trees and go back to a MoP design where talent tiers were themed
3. Make Azerite armor spec specific traits stronger
4. Allow you to convert some of the AP invested into old azerite gear into new Azerite gear.
5. introduce a world quest bonus for doing a variety
6. Increase drop rates for weapons from heroics so players can have decent gear for raids
7. Island Expeditions increase drop rates on vanity stuff (Blizz already did this but they need to do it again IMO)
8. Patch notes, patch notes, patch notes
9. Explain in moderate detail how scaling works in instanced PVP, world PVP and PVE scaling.
10. Fix the mission table quests to be rewarding or reduce the resources costs.

[probert]

After playing for weeks and enjoying myself, when the big content isn't even out yet, coming to the forums is like entering a different reality.

Questioning myself as any constructive or introspective post seems to just turn into a flame war, its not really worth the effort to actually try and break things down anymore

that said, my focus is more on the medium-long term. i remember the early days of Cata and WoD, where everyone was talking about how much fun they were having. it took a good 3 months for WoD to sour, and a little longer for cata.

I see the same problems with this expansion as the others...in fact, it feels more hollow than WoD.

Warfronts start today, the hour i've done doesn't point to longevity or a compelling end game activity. crafting turn ins for rep is a mechanic dating back to WoW Vanilla...that Blizzard stepped away from as ruinous to the in game economy and ultimately boring. what's old is new again!

in short, in support of your experience...i think there's a good ~100 hours of leveling / dailies / dungeons content, maybe stretched a bit further with raiding and warfronts over the next month or so.

given the next expansion is 18-24 mons away, i think 6 months from now Wow will be in rough shape.

For $90 (3mos sub + expansion) its been a fun time. but i don't see lots of people hanging around for the next 2 years...UNLESS changes are made, which was my proposal for this thread.

[grovewd]

I just stumbled across this on the front page of mmo-c and had to login to say:

Friend, to say nothing of the rest of this post, if you think Blizzard is going to "majorly revamp" the Azerite armor system - the CORE character progression and customization design vehicle they have pinned the ENTIRE expansion to - at ANY point - much less by the first major content patch - ....I think you need to cut your losses now and find a new game to spend the next two years playing....

[Arrashi]

Giving up on "bare minimum approach" mentality.

[cronotose]

OP creates a giant list of mostly valid criticisms with specificity. Most of community responds by ignoring every point on the list and just calling BFA "good". It's kind of sad really. Come on guys, WHY aren't his specific points problems? Just because you're enjoying yourself personally doesn't mean there aren't issues with the expansion. Think critically. Some people enjoyed Mists and Warlords too, that didn't mean there weren't things that needed addressing.

As for my end, WoW just seems so robotic these days. Class design is very simple. Most combat revolves around a three-ish button rotation. You log in, check your emissary. Its reward probably sucks, but it's the only really worthwhile source of rep outside the mission table, so you do it. Maybe you run a dungeon or two, but you don't really care which ones, because gear from source to source is basically the same. The mobs you run into are scaled to you at all times, so enemies are never very easy, but also never particularly difficult. The whole thing just feels flat. A world in an MMO is supposed to feel large, with endless possibilities. When you make (nearly) every spec into generic replacements of the same archetypes (tank, healer, melee and ranged dps) and make gear very generic and just marginal state increases without room for quirky builds, you've just sucked all the MMO out of the MMO. They've polished the rough edges of an MMO to such a degree that they didn't notice that they ground it to dust.

It's a shame too because a lot of the frosting on this cake is quite good. Dungeon boss mechanics are strong, production quality in the cutscenes is there. The base core though, everything relating to who you are and what you do in the game has been reduced to the simplest form of "press 1,2,3 until your numbers go up slightly (which does nothing, because the enemies gain strength at the same rate), then press 1,2,3 again." Where's the theorycrafting of silly builds? Where's the rare and unusual items that have unique effects that open up new opportunities? Where's the zone/boss fight that turns character building on its head and requires a different set of stats? Where's the beef?

In terms of solutions, it's tough now that BFA has shipped. Making any serious changes under the hood is a HUGE undertaking now.There's no time to, in addition to major content patches, rework the core design of the classes and world and test it all against each other. Probably the easiest way to go about it is to do it through itemization. You can add crazy and fun items to the game that effect classes a lot easier than you can fiddle around with the classes themselves.

[Sarkol]

Questioning myself as any constructive or introspective post seems to just turn into a flame war, its not really worth the effort to actually try and break things down anymore

that said, my focus is more on the medium-long term. i remember the early days of Cata and WoD, where everyone was talking about how much fun they were having. it took a good 3 months for WoD to sour, and a little longer for cata.

I see the same problems with this expansion as the others...in fact, it feels more hollow than WoD.

Warfronts start today, the hour i've done doesn't point to longevity or a compelling end game activity. crafting turn ins for rep is a mechanic dating back to WoW Vanilla...that Blizzard stepped away from as ruinous to the in game economy and ultimately boring. what's old is new again!

in short, in support of your experience...i think there's a good ~100 hours of leveling / dailies / dungeons content, maybe stretched a bit further with raiding and warfronts over the next month or so.

given the next expansion is 18-24 mons away, i think 6 months from now Wow will be in rough shape.

For $90 (3mos sub + expansion) its been a fun time. but i don't see lots of people hanging around for the next 2 years...UNLESS changes are made, which was my proposal for this thread.

I mean, WoD literally had 1 real content patch. It's very easy for Blizzard to out do that. I don't see why we wouldn't get a similar patch cycle to Legion, and if we do, i have nothing to beef about. It's the same as always. Raids, but also the great addition of Mythic + for people who like it. We'll see how warfronts and Islands hold up but Islands were fine imo. Maybe people expected too much.

[Flurryfang]

BFA is doing fine. It is far from perfect, but that is the situation with all expansions.

BFA does not need saving.

[Nextron]

A time machine to go back and beta test it wouldn't hurt.

[KOUNTERPARTS]

Another year, another expansion, another cycle of whining.

I think it's time for the older generation of WoW players to move on to something else.

How about Solitaire?

[Maduk]

After doing Expeditions for the weekly cap, mythics (which are done pretty quick too), the occasional emissary, whats there more to do (except grinding azerite/reps)?
Currently I'm doing rnd BGs which are ok, but still kind of feel like a waste of time.

[heskel]

bfa uterly lacks ambition. Every system is that'll do. a castrated legion is all we got but the pigs will gobble down anything you put in the feeder.

[Osmeric]

Blizzard can do nothing. I think the game has gone into terminal decline.

It is clear that BfA is the result of ever-tightening budget screws on the WoW team. And that is the result of declining revenue. BfA is very likely going to cause even more loss of revenue if a substantial number if players find it unacceptable. That means the next expansion, if there even is one, will be even more slapdash.

I think the F2P transition cannot be far away.