Ghostcrawler Post on Feedback: Which side is right?

[Daetur]

I don't think those things are mutually exclusive.

The incredibly difficult thing that needs to be done is to find the right balance- to identify exactly what the game's soul IS, at its core, and innovate around it.

[Nefarious Tea]

I mean, it's not like he was the public face on the forums for a few expansions or anything.

… waaaaait.

I'd be willing to bet that at least half of people playing WoW currently never played when GC was Lead Systems Designer.

[Daetur]

GC (and many other developers, specifically all of them) doesn't understand the difference between "I'm upset because what I know and liked was changed" and "I'm upset because what I know and liked was made worse".

To be fair, I'm not sure a lot of players understand the difference either- or at least, don't know how to clearly express it.

[Deleted]

I don't think those things are mutually exclusive.

The incredibly difficult thing that needs to be done is to find the right balance- to identify exactly what the game's soul IS, at its core, and innovate around it.

I've thought about it for a long time...i thought and re-thought again...and came to the conclusion "oldschool ideals" have no place in current WoW.
The game is too different and a simple "old change" wouldnt magically recreate the old feelings.
Its impossible to go back.

So innovation is what i think is right for the game.

[MasterOfNone]

GC is not famous over here but he made an interesting post regarding player feedback on why players leave the game.
https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/p...ly-real-way-by

He said generally there are 2 sides of player feedback presented to Blizzard

1) “Players are getting bored - we must be bold and innovate!”
2) “We are changing the game so much that we’re losing our soul! We need to get back to basics!”


Ahah, i think it would be kinda funny to see which side you think is right
GC says generally this are the 2 big groups giving feedback to Blizzard.

his post is from long ago mate. not sure if he feels the same way now. impossible to say.
well the first post anyway. which particular part are you talkin about. he kinda mentions quitting a lot

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

LoL yeah. Which side is right? BOTH! lol

In my opinion is "innovation"

Because oldschool ideas have no place in current WoW. The game changed too much.
There isnt a single oldschool idea that would work in current WoW IMO.
I've thought about it for a long time.

So in my opinion is innovation.

Honestly I think the issue is more complicated than "we need a major revamp" or "we need a major rollback."

WoW is getting stale for longtime players, that much is obvious. I've argued with enough people who feel like BFA, which is largely just coasting on what Legion did well, didn't "add enough to be good" to see that.

At the same time the game simply isn't attracting new users at a rate that can slow the downward trajectory, and that's probably because people see 120 levels, 6 expansions, a laundry list of features added, integral, and removed.

Probably not a popular opinion at Blizzard, but I for one think the sub fee is a huge barrier to entry. Especially at the price. You've got MMOs coming out these days with $9.99 fees, or $12.99 fees, but WoW is still chugging along with a baseline $14.99 to play, PLUS expansion purchases (which BFA finally removed except for the current one). Heck that's a chunk of why I leave FFXIV with a rolling sub, while with WoW I will only buy 30 days of game time.

[Lane]

I've thought about it for a long time...i thought and re-thought again...and came to the conclusion "oldschool ideals" have no place in current WoW.
The game is too different and a simple "old change" wouldnt magically recreate the old feelings.
Its impossible to go back.

So innovation is what i think is right for the game.

I believe it's that 'old school' thinking that's keeping WoW from being a better game. There's a lot of room for Blizzard to innovate, the problem is they just don't usually with the reason that it'd harm the MMO experience somehow. I've lost count of features in other MMOs I think, "Why doesn't Blizzard implement this?" It used to be they took ideas from other games and made them better, but I don't recall the last time I've seen them do that. WoW, at this point, is the most old school MMO I play by a fair margin. I don't know if it's because the devs themselves are locked into the idea of what an MMO should be, if they're trying to cater to the crowds that loved classic/BC, or both.

[Ungeir]

Neither really hits the mark. They underallocated engineering resources to this expansion and as a result the new features are shallow reskins of existing features. The class design which for some classes was already in trouble during Legion has been left to rot, making the core gameplay experience a lot less fun than it could be. The zone stories are generally really good, but the overall expansion story of faction of war is boring, weird, has no momentum and has managed to make both sides angry (Teldrassil, Sylvanas, Saurfang, etc.)

- Incredibly underdeveloped new systems
- A surprising number of harmless, but embarassing, quality assurance/bug issues
- Classes left untouched and feeling amputated after Legion
- Poor communication of hidden and opaque mechanics (scaling, warfronts)
- Boring story with no momentum or sense of urgency
- Gorgeous content and a good amount of it, but still less than Legion (especially for players not playing both sides)

The dungeons and raids are very high quality - and apart from the unfinished Vol'dun and Stormsong, the levelling content is amazing. The War campaign is unimpressive.

Looking at the Q&A, interviews, etc. my impression is that they know very well that they've underdelivered in a large number of areas - but they simply don't have the resources to fix those things. So they use a mixture of admitting fault and deflection to avoid commiting to anything but relatively minor changes. Patch content is probably going to be quite meaty, but I think they're nervous about the negative vibes sticking to the expansion and reducing the impact of content patches.

I really don't think they are having discussion about whether they need to go back to basics or whether they need to innovate - I think there's a huge internal power struggle going about resource allocation, so they can do anything at all. Someone at a higher level than the game director has decided to focus on content and not systems/features/classes.

Ghostcrawler worked for a different Blizzard - there's been massive growth since then. They have numerous new games that need development and maintenance, they're working on several new projects and they have the classic project. Art can be outsourced (and Blizzard is known to do this) and is generally easier to recruit for than engineering. I see a Blizzard stretched thin when it comes to development resources, and they're not at all in a position where the problem is *what* to do - it's figuring out how to do something with limited resources.

Glassdoor is an anonymous source and shouldn't be trusted 100%, but reading the reviews there, specifically from engineers, and it really looks they are underpaying and understaffed, and refusing to take the necessary steps to fix this.

I don't think WoW has a design problem (since they're not really designing anything at the moment) - it has a development problem.

[Maudib]

GC is not famous over here but he made an interesting post regarding player feedback on why players leave the game.
https://askghostcrawler.tumblr.com/p...ly-real-way-by

He said generally there are 2 sides of player feedback presented to Blizzard

1) “Players are getting bored - we must be bold and innovate!”
2) “We are changing the game so much that we’re losing our soul! We need to get back to basics!”


Ahah, i think it would be kinda funny to see which side you think is right
GC says generally this are the 2 big groups giving feedback to Blizzard.

Vanilla grew from 0 to 7.5 million players over two years... BC grew from 7.5 million to about 11 million over 2 years... and WotLK grew from 11 million to over 12 million players over 2 years. Not once in 6 years did the game drop in subs.. not ONCE.

The next two expansions lost almost half the subscriber base in 3.5 years. WOD managed to rebound to 10 million players only to lose nearly half of them in 6 months.

Legion? Now BfA? We will never truly "know"... but the leak does bode ill for the game... and expectedly so. I would venture to say BfA is currently at less than half of Vanilla at it's best.

With all that said... I don;t think WoW can survive another "bold and innovative" expansion like BfA. Classic will prove what is the more profitable and popular game development style.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Vanilla grew from 0 to 7.5 million players over two years... BC grew from 7.5 million to about 11 million over 2 years... and WotLK grew from 11 million to over 12 million players over 2 years. Not once in 6 years did the game drop in subs.. not ONCE.

The next two expansions lost almost half the subscriber base in 3.5 years. WOD managed to rebound to 10 million players only to lose nearly half of them in 6 months.

Legion? Now BfA? We will never truly "know"... but the leak does bode ill for the game... and expectedly so. I would venture to say BfA is currently at less than half of Vanilla at it's best.

With all that said... I don;t think WoW can survive another "bold and innovative" expansion like BfA. Classic will prove what is the more profitable and popular game development style.

I mean most of WoW's playerbase was fueled by a pop culture bubble that burst once MOBAs came onto the scene. Remember the Night Elf Mohawk commercial? The South Park episode? If you get stuff like that now, it's about esports. Namely LoL-style Esports.

And that leak was pretty resoundingly confirmed bogus.

But you be you.

[Gaexion Ramza Beoulve]

I think there's a reddit post talking about the core issue in wow.

And to summarize it is this: We have been going in circles since MoP. Talents lost from the tree, added back in with glyphs, then removed with wod, and then abilities pruned, and then given back, and then glyphs removed, and then legion artifact adding them back, and then losing the artifact and Azerite Armor is taking the place of...

Talent tree talents, Pruned Abilities, Glyphs, Legiondaries, Artifacts, and now Raid gear.

Add in titanforging, reforging/respeccing and the facts that players just don't like Azerite gear and you've got a soup going.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

I think there's a reddit post talking about the core issue in wow.

And to summarize it is this: We have been going in circles since MoP. Talents lost from the tree, added back in with glyphs, then removed with wod, and then abilities pruned, and then given back, and then glyphs removed, and then legion artifact adding them back, and then losing the artifact and Azerite Armor is taking the place of...

Talent tree talents, Pruned Abilities, Glyphs, Legiondaries, Artifacts, and now Raid gear.

Add in titanforging, reforging/respeccing and the facts that players just don't like Azerite gear and you've got a soup going.

Or, in shorter terms, "Borrowed Gear."

Which is a stupid system to begin with. Heck every time I think of "where do we go from Azerite" I inevitably circle back around to Glyphs. Because that's basically what Azerite is once you strip away the fancy UI. It's a series of Glyphs you apply via your armor.

[Malikath]

Both can be correct at the same time.

exactly, but no one on their side wants to admit that blizzard have fucked up that badly.

[Sluvs]

On one hand, the lack of innovation is what hurts BfA, on the other, I wish the game had a few elements from vanilla, harder leveling, the adventure feeling and etc.

[Kralljin]

IMHO its more relevant than ever
because BFA reeks of a development team out of ideas.

Not sure, i think the usual "overshooting / undershooting" happened, Legion was basically a massive "Sugarrush" with legendaries, artifacts, new talents and the usual stuff you had for an expansion.

Then they pretty much realized they cannot build more systems on top of that, so they removed some existing systems and tried to implement things that were not as impactful as the Legion ones.
The other side of that coin however is what we have now, systems that don't really stick because they lack impact.

Not only the phasing out of the Legion stuff (Artifacts & Legendaries) but also the removal of your standard new stuff in an expansion (new spells / talents) along with something like Set bonuses were too much to remove in a single expansion, the Azerite system is simply not in the place to compensate all of that.

During the Q&A's before BfA and shortly afterwards Ion kept telling that they simply can't just keep adding new stuff, because it gets too much at one point, BfA was a result of that, they focused too much on that content being rather easily containable within a single expansion.

And that is simply has been a longterm goal of Blizzard for WoW, create more stuff that is limited to a singular expansion, Chilton said this already back in MoP, things like the Garrison,Artifact or Azerite system are a result of that philosophy.
The secondary progression system (primary being gear) has been in the making since MoP, the Legendary questchain there, Legendary questchain 2.0 in WoD+Garrison, Legion having Artifact and BfA having the Heart of Azeroth.

[seleri]

If you actually read his post, he says that these aren't player feedback. These are two things he says devs think when they lose a lot of players in a short amount of time.

The actual player feedback for most that leave, according to him, are "I have less time to play now (job/school/family" and "My friends don’t play anymore."

Of course, most people will ignore that to push a narrative.

[Thunderball]

Blizzard taking feedback from players without having their own direction with the game is what got the game to the state it is now. So yeah, dont ever listen to either.

[clevin]

The problem with the framing of "“We are changing the game so much that we’re losing our soul! We need to get back to basics!” is that it isn't a single point, it's 2 points in one.

1) We're changing to much and 'losing our soul'

2) We need to get back to basics.

Those aren't necessarily tied together. Changing, even significant changing, does not mean you're losing your soul as a game. It's the KIND of changes and whether they stem from some core vision or whether they're just new shiny things that's the issue. The reaction to lots of change isn't necessarily getting back to basics either, but rather whether the changes need to be steered back to, again, the core vision of the game.

Some changes, like Expeditions, don't really violate the core of the game but they feel lightweight and not really needed. They're not well integrated into the game - I can ignore them and nothing really bad happens. There's no gap in the story, nothing.

Other changes like the spec reworks, can mess with the game in significant ways. Scaling, for example, was a problem As with every expansion, we got weaker as we went on and at 120 I didn't feel I'd progressed. I was no stronger than I was at 110 and I gained no new skills. That violates a core tenet of RPG games, that my character should become more powerful and/or complex as I gain levels.

[Shadowferal]

How often has Blizz done things without ever taking into consideration the player-base...at all?

- - - Updated - - -

Other changes like the spec reworks, can mess with the game in significant ways. Scaling, for example, was a problem As with every expansion, we got weaker as we went on and at 120 I didn't feel I'd progressed. I was no stronger than I was at 110 and I gained no new skills. That violates a core tenet of RPG games, that my character should become more powerful and/or complex as I gain levels.

Never understood scaling. What was the point in making low-level zones into higher-level to begin with? I liked feeling uber-powerful when coming "home." And soloing a low level dungeon that was a "problem" for me earlier was my way of dishing out payback to that murderous furbolg...(You know who you are...YOU SUMBITCH!!)
Scaling to me was a waste...why create unique zones to explore/quest in when I can stay right in beginner's territory...?

[Deleted]

I think we need to get rid of x-realms, lfg(definetly lfr) and battlegroups and get the community feeling back in wow.

noone knows anyone and for a game thats mostly fun because of the ppl this has been a major loss since tbc