Bellular is wrong and his kind of mentality is what is wrong with WoW

[ReVnX]

More than rewards, what WoW needs is a sense of "journey" that has been lost over the years.

Now it only feels like a grind for the first part of any patch and a drought for the rest of it, waiting for the next patch/exp. And when it arrives it does not matter at all what you did in the previous one.

[Skildar]

I was complaining for quite some time that this expansion lacks a real suramar-style questing arc, and I hope it will come to life in the future, but I was wrong to complain because there is a lot of non-repeatable content. The only thing is that you have to play both faction story zones to trully enjoy this expansion.

But damn, you will enjoy it a lot if you do!

About WQ and island, I feel that they are fine and that the vendors will give more incentive to do islands. But some WQ needs to be fixed to take less time to complete, and basically the ones that ask you to kill a single guy should become the less lucrative WQ to balance it between finishing quickly emissary and taking the time gathering more impactful rewards.

[Thelyron]

Once i have no more rewards to obtain and work towards, i stop playing. So no, he's completely right. Also, the "ultimate cosmetic reward" doesn't exist. I can like a new thing without stopping to like the old thing. I regularly switch my transmogs, when i complete a new one, i'll wear that one for a while, but that doesn't mean i'm never switching back to the old ones.

[HuxNeva]

First, it would be easier to improve if such things would come organically in the game, not by watching guides or whatever. When you need addons and sims to learn about your own performance and if some gear is an upgrade to you or not, this does not really help. Gearing should be as simple as it could be.

100% disagree. The gearing meta-game is more rich now than it ever was except Legion. If you want to keep it simple, just trow on wathever is higher ilvl (except azerite) and you'll still not be more than 10% wrong. If you like min/max'ing, then there is now actually something to get your teeth in and explore and experiment.
Legion did one better with instance out of combat swappable Legendaries with significant gameplay impacting traits, but BfA in terms of gearing choices and decisioning is most certainly second.

[Raven]

He is not totally wrong but not totally right either, its he's opinion of what is wrong, but that doesnt mean its wrong or right only that its right for him, but stuff he feels are problems in wow others can like and other way around.

[Thelyron]

Bellular, Heelvsbabyface, Asmongold, Preach... They've all been 100% spot on with their criticisms of the state of the game.

Asmongold has been never been right about anything.

[Ratyrel]

Bell is partly right though... Visual rewards are rewarding for a lot (most?) of people. See the mage tower in legion, the number of hours people put in for just a visual reward. Or class sets for raiders. You want to show off your progress and achievements, I know I do.

People did the mage tower because not everyone else could or would do it.

Rewards have to be meaningful. By the sixth expansion, almost every player has realised that most rewards in WoW are made obsolete by the treadmill. That makes them uninteresting. At the same time, the game has been increasingly designed around streamlining access to this treadmill style of progression to counteract this declining interest. The only way to counteract this is a different source of meaning, namely story-telling. I am sure Blizz knows this, given the videos we have been receiving, etc., but unfortunately Blizz cannot produce enough of that kind of content.

[SirCowdog]

This right here... Class design is by far the most important thing, if it's not done right EVERYTHING else suffers.

The treadmill of repeating content over and over can only be fun if the vehicle you use to work that repetitive cycle is fun. In other words, if the class itself is fun to play, the content you're running through time after time will still be fun.

Blizzard seems to have missed and forgotten this point. They think that players will just keep slogging through any dull, boring, shite as long as there's a shiny at the end. That only holds up so long.

[HuxNeva]

Bellular, Heelvsbabyface, Asmongold, Preach... They've all been 100% spot on with their criticisms of the state of the game.

Bell's and Preach's criticisms are more reasonable and thought through than Heelvsbabyface's and Asmongold's though. Not saying the latter are 100% wrong, but they are mostly myopic and more like that rambling nagging drunk Uncle at the Christmas family gathering that with the best will in the world you are trying to find a coherent and sensible interpretation of his polarized oversimplified rant for but the effort is more than it is worth and he'll never understand the nuances and underlying forces at work no matter how much you are trying to explain it to him.

[crusadernero]

The game just feels shallow at this point. My main(Paladin) feels so bland and boring now, which I didnt think was possible to do. Paladins has had many changes over the years, but now it feels slow and boring. As I understand, this is the general notion for many classes.

The Azerite gear and system was and IS a huge failure. This is obviously supposed to replace tier sets, and so far it has failed horribly. Sure, the idea was to give more options and a new way to gear up, but it all ended up being a RNG slogfest were people will go for the "correct" piece anyway(Just like tier gear).

With the removal of tier gear, they also removed class gear for a raid tier. Maybe not a big thing, but its yet another blow to class identity.

I never liked nor cared about the azerite system. Sure, leveling the neck is fine, but that neck should have had the same setup as our artifact in Legion. It never felt cool getting azerite gear, compared to when tier gear dropped.

They should have kept artifact system in BfA, having the neck being our artifact were we could add points to various stuff.

personally I think they removed tier gear for all classes because its way easier to create azerite gear for cloth, leather, mail & plate.

Slowly but steadily the game is getting more and more bland and hollow. Each xpac there is something that requires less of Blizzard, and even less of us.

The game is not designed to be played all the time. It feels like they want us to sub for a few months and then unsub for 6+ months until next patch/xpac. Queue IE, WF, BG, M+, LFR. Repeat until bored, unsub.

Outside of dungeons & raids there is nothing to do once you reach exalted with BfA factions. There is no reason to venture out in the world and complete the WQ's. Makes it even more stupid when thinking about we wont have flying in another 6+ months.

[Doomchicken]

This right here... Class design is by far the most important thing, if it's not done right EVERYTHING else suffers.

Except it's not though. If class design was everything the game would of fell flat on its ugly ass face from the second the game launched, and would of floundered even further during burning crusade. So unless you want to sit there and lie to me and tell me BC's 1 button spam specs like ele shaman was the peak of class design, I think it's quite obvious theres a LOT more to the success and failure of a game than just class design. It is a part of it, but it's not the be all and end all.

[Norome]

So, basically everyone in this thread has a statement about what is wrong with the game and it's ultimately correct, right?

Speaking of rewards, the generic term for that from game theory perspective would probably be "outcome". And, again, outcome in games in particular is ultimately "fun".
If you don't have fun, you don't enjoy the game and eventually you don't play it. The difference here is, that if on top of that you regularly visit mmo-champ, you go there and give your statement about that, that in most cases could be summed up as "the game bad and thus, Blizzard is a bad company".
Something tells me that if you were given a simple match-3 game and were supposed to make it better, you'd fail miserably.

You can only make so much content for so many types of players. There are people who prefer raiding, some who prefer pvp, some who only do pet battles, some may do more of those things and some do all of those things. I can assure you that blizz do have analytics data for pretty much everything, so they do know what people do, what spells they use, etc. And I guess they have at least a small team of people who go through all of that and try to figure out "why" and where to go from there. Even small companies do this, so I can imagine Blizz do this on a whole other level.
And I'm pretty sure in many cases, the results are either highly inconclusive, or the sample is so relatively small it's hard to make any deductions out of it.
Like, 0.01% of playerbase have killed mythic g'huun so far.. so.. should we nerf it so more people do it?
Or, 33% of people do raiding, 32% do pvp and the rest is spread relatively evenly among the rest of the content. What do we do? Do we risk it and randomly focus either of them and thus sacrifice the other?

For me, there is one thing that basically sums the state of wow development for me. I remember a particular wow streamer talking about blizzcon after he got back. And said he was talking to some blizz developer who works on rogue class design and how after first guilds downed mythic Zul, the encounter designer stormed into his office with "what the fuck are those rogues doing to my boss?".
So, either people who design classes don't ever play them in real content, and/or content/encounter designers have no idea about classes the content is designed for.

[arr0gance]

The only thing tragic about this thread are people lobbing Bellular's comments in with mongoloids like Asmon and Heelvsbabyface. Sadly, pragmatism is a lost art. Everything doesn't have to be taking a side. It isn't all bad or all good. And for what it's worth, Bellular's comments are spot on.

[Deleted]

You are either unable to grasp what Bell is talking about, or you are purposefully ignorant.

Bellular has spoken lengths about WoW needing engaging gameplay content that is muliplicative. No where in this video does he say that "This is the solution to solving WoW".

This video is about cosmetic rewards, and how giving out heritage armour for free is not a good way to make cosmetic rewards feel special and rewarding.

[gobio]

Seriously. BFA is a no effort expansion.

Put in some god damn effort, anything. To argue "I want A", "No give me B", "You both are morons, C is the answer" is a mot debate, as Blizzard is giving you absolutly barebone basic content and a losely assembled grind system.

Seriously who gives a shit. When you walk into legion expansion, it is full of EFFORT. Your order hall, your legendary weapon, the unqiue story behind them, the well planed center zone that is to be filled with long meaningful quest line that is loved by most.

Now you walk into BFA, and you click 5 stupid shit and that retarded dwarf just tell you : "here, get this shit and grind, don't bother coming back to me until you gain a rank in reputation". Yeah, with this much effort into this expansion. Demanding anything is hopeless, cosmetic, quest, anything. You are not getting it, their best dev are gone. Suck it up.

[Sulika]

The biggest problems with BFA is that Blizzard listened to too many of the youtube experts who were telling them that the effects on legendaries were too powerful and that weaker passive effects would be better, now that we have boring passive Azerite traits the same youtube experts are bemoaning how boring they are. Same with Artifact Power, all the people who were complaining that Artifact power was too beneficial and that it made people want to farm it are now crying that the much weaker Azerite Power isn't worth farming. The people complaining that Emerald Nightmare was too easy are now complaining that Uldir is too hard. Pretty much all of BFAs problems come down to Blizzard listening to feedback and not trusting their own years of game design experience.

[Vlaid]

I unsubbed first month of BFA because all my favorite specs had all fun deleted from them and felt sluggish and dull. Azerite doesn't come close to replacing artifact+artifact ability+sets+legendaries.

Class design is just bad in BFA, might be good for some specs or classes but not mine. The rewards didn't feel great but for most expansions rewards are just a matter of more transmog options and x more ilvl.

[HumbleDuck]

Since he started his "game design" course at school, he started to take himself too seriously.

Actually he is, he is currently building a side scroller game with developers. He talks about it on his youtube a lot.

I released a side scroller to appStore years ago, am I a game designer?

[Torto]

I released a side scroller to appStore years ago, am I a game designer?

Sure, why not?

[eduwneso]

The biggest problems with BFA is that Blizzard listened to too many of the youtube experts who were telling them that the effects on legendaries were too powerful and that weaker passive effects would be better, now that we have boring passive Azerite traits the same youtube experts are bemoaning how boring they are. Same with Artifact Power, all the people who were complaining that Artifact power was too beneficial and that it made people want to farm it are now crying that the much weaker Azerite Power isn't worth farming. The people complaining that Emerald Nightmare was too easy are now complaining that Uldir is too hard. Pretty much all of BFAs problems come down to Blizzard listening to feedback and not trusting their own years of game design experience.

You are right, if I have to put a % in it (kind of random I know) it would be 70% of the problems come from listening too much. They certainly need to go their way and don't read anymore about what people think.