Forbes BfA Interview, Blizzcon Early Access Sale, Darkshore Warfront with Devs

[joxur]

I mean, the one thing we've asked for is just more content. Not a complete re-work of every class, not azerite traits. Just content. Most people agree that the dungeons and raid in BFA are great. We're on our 3rd major revamp of demo locks since Legion and they still suck. Just stop it. Make more content.

[Risale]

he's right though, there WAS a lot of feedback and there WAS a lot of BS-feedback as well. I can imagine that if you have no one who filters out the good from the bad, that it's impossible to find useful information.

A lot of feedback is also not useful. Statements like "remove the GCD change, it's garbage" isn't useful since it doesn't adress the reason why they implemented it in the first place. I've seen no thread where someone who doesn't like it mentioned the problem Ion talked about above.

The thing is they got this feedback not only from the cranks but more importantly from those players that are part of the top 20 guilds, during alpha & beta testing and they didn't listen to them either.
If you don't listen to those that are in that small group then you as a dev or boss like Ion don't give a flying fuck about your players.

[Twiztedterry]

The thing is they got this feedback not only from the cranks but more importantly from those players that are part of the top 20 guilds, during alpha & beta testing and they didn't listen to them either.
If you don't listen to those that are in that small group then you as a dev or boss like Ion don't give a flying fuck about your players.

The issue is not how many people gave "Feedback' but the form in which that feedback was given.

It's difficult from a dev standpoint to do anything with the information your given when you don't understand the crux of the issue.

Look at the difference between these two feedback reports.

"The changes to GCD suck, fix it"

"I don't like the way GCD affects my class, it makes it feel slower and more clunky"


It all goes back to that old adage, If Henry Ford had done what everyone else wanted, we would have had faster horses.

WoW's playerbase is bad at providing useful feedback, they mention a solution to a problem, but not the problem itself, and when the CM's ask them what the problem is, they get defensive and start shouting, which causes the thread to get locked, and that feedback is ruined.


The WoW dev team isn't 100% to blame for this, we deserve some of that blame ourselves.

[Deleted]

what a joke

[joxur]

It's difficult from a dev standpoint to do anything with the information your given when you don't understand the crux of the issue.

My experience is that the class discords are a great source for expertise on every spec in the game. It's not hard to login to discord, figure out who knows what they're talking about, and setup a focused and formal feedback loop during beta. Do you know how many product people would love to have that kind of focused expertise available?

[javierdsv]

I wonder if the GCD changes were actually just to lower server stress. And in the long run, prune more abilities, to lower their storage stress.

[PlazaPlaza]

Revert GCD and balance the classes a bit better (melee ouch) and I'm happy.

[dranlord]

What really bothers me and I'm sure bothers a lot of other players is the stance that they didn't have time to work on these issues before release. They didn't have to release on the day they did. In the past, they've held product to give more time to tune fix known issues. The release announcement said the expansion would release no later than September 21st, so why rush it out more than a month early? They could have done a proper beta test before release if they gave themselves another month.

In the June 14th Q&A specifically said that enhancement, shadow, and to a lesser extent elemental shaman would not be getting the attention they needed until 8.1 as the window for major changes was rapidly closing. If they knew 2 months prior to release that they weren't able to address these issues and still were going forward with the release date, maybe that's a problem with their new policies? I mean, you have 12 classes in the game and you are saying that you know that both dps specs for one class aren't in the best place. If you've been playing a dps shaman forever and a lead at Blizzard is telling you that they know that you don't have a good option for your class to dps right now, but please wait 5 months for this to be addressed (from the date of the interview, not release to 8.1), don't you have a right to be upset by that?

bc, is impossible to tune, every single class w/o million of player feedback, some tunning go beyond the betas, more at the point the game is.

No game to this day come out 100% polish, and ever game have bug. So i dont know why ppl give so much crap to blizzard about it, they work hard to introduce alot of fix during current patch and majoy change on new patchs.

Other online game dont fix shit for years.

Plus lets be real you guys complain about Spriest or Shaman, and isnt the first expansion 1 class is broken till a later patch. So what is the issue?

[Vertigo X]

bc, is impossible to tune, every single class w/o million of player feedback, some tunning go beyond the betas, more at the point the game is.

No game to this day come out 100% polish, and ever game have bug. So i dont know why ppl give so much crap to blizzard about it, they work hard to introduce alot of fix during current patch and majoy change on new patchs.

Other online game dont fix shit for years.

Plus lets be real you guys complain about Spriest or Shaman, and isnt the first expansion 1 class is broken till a later patch. So what is the issue?

They scrapped systems that worked in order to implement systems that didn't. They don't listen to feedback. They give non-answers (one of the blue posts was "deal with it"). There are many issues and ignoring them and defending blizzard is just sending the wrong message to them. You can be okay with a half assed mediocre product from a multi billion dollar company but many others aren't.

[McNeil]

So many interviews lately, it really feels like they are pushing damage control further and further.

[Maarius]

I am worried they are happy with the shitshow that is wm too. Pseudo Forced pvp because pve rewards are locked behind it was never a good idea.

Do you personally have the feeling that most of the people in WM only do it for the (minor) PvE rewards? Personally I love the new Warmode and I haven't ever turned it on to receive a 10% bonus on WQs, but maybe that's just my subjective perspective on that matter.

All in all I just feel that people really like WM, but maybe it's just the people I play with.

[VanishO2]

"The team is happy with how War Mode turned out as well as the dungeons and raid."

Of course they are, everyone is playing with warmode on because of the absurd amount of unecessary bonuses for doing so. Even players from "pve realms" are playing with warmode on because the bonuses are really stupid and finding groups with warmode off on group finder became a problem (is it that hard to filter the warmode on/off from the list Blizzard? Jesus...).

Everyone is doing dungeons because it's far easier to drop gear and raid loot is crap except from the azerite armor (which make players farm the raid because of it).

It's a total mess, but they're happy with it.

[Tic Tacs]

Him talking about bugs and people reporting them and fixing is tricky is such a deceitful statement. I've reported multiple herbalism nodes spawning under the objects and rocks (impossible to gather) in beta and on live multiple times especially Winter's Kisses in Tiragarde Sounds. Guess what? Blizzard still didn't move the locations of these nodes close to 2 months in into the expansion. I guess moving nodes from x location to y is so hard and takes so much coding.

Yes, I'm calling Ian, the "fake" game director, a liar.

[Archmage Alodi]

I really want to punch Ion's face.

[Finear]

This truly made me giggle slyly... Happy yeah... Ok. Maybe the teams happy but your players arn't.

im pretty sure players are also happy about war mode raids and dungeons

There are obvious issues with bfa but uldir and war mode are not one od them

[Galateacyc]

bc, is impossible to tune, every single class w/o million of player feedback, some tunning go beyond the betas, more at the point the game is.

No game to this day come out 100% polish, and ever game have bug. So i dont know why ppl give so much crap to blizzard about it, they work hard to introduce alot of fix during current patch and majoy change on new patchs.

Other online game dont fix shit for years.

Plus lets be real you guys complain about Spriest or Shaman, and isnt the first expansion 1 class is broken till a later patch. So what is the issue?

Well, for starters, 5 months of no changes to a broken experience for someone playing a specific class, costs that player 5x$15 = $75 - the price of a new AAA game.

Then, of course, to add insult to injury, they have shown to be perfectly capable of rushing out emergency next day out of cycle hot fixes for things they deem broken even if they are not harming anyone (things like toy cooldowns, completing group quests in raid groups in WoD, and they even almost pulled the trigger on a next day emergency fix to patch out garrison fishing in a raid group). Their priorities are completely out of whack with how long fixes take. To leave a class/spec utterly unable to play content for months on end while patching out fun within a day is completely unacceptable.

Players have every right to be pissed.

[aeuhe4yxzhds]

was some major issues at launch such as the auction house lag

WAS??? how the fuck is it any better now...

[Kyphael]

Every Ion interview can be re-capped with;

It's an issue we're aware of and we'll patch it.
It's not that big an issue, we can't please everyone.
The team is happy with it.

[americandavey]

I honestly don't think he has 100% say on everything unfortunately and he has to defend their design choices which are not all his. It seems to me like there might be inner turmoil within the dev teams, you can see in his face that he is not happy and is just being a politician about a lot of stuff.

If the Game Director doesnt have control of the game that he is in charge of, then what is the point of having a Game Director. Yeah I am sure Chilton let people under him determine what goes in WOW without his approval when he was Game Director.

[Tharkash]

Ion never said that the classes were not complete in the Q & A in which he said certain specs needed to wait for a patch to get adjustments, just that some of them needed to be adjusted and looked at still.

He most certainly did. He said, explicitly, that both shaman DPS specs and Shadow priests weren't finished at launch and would have to wait till 8.1 to get changes. So what, now he gets to flat out lie and we're to take it?