WoW 2.0: What Blizzard MUST Do & How It WILL Happen

[Cosmic Janitor]

Actually LFR is not ruining anything in my opinion.It is fine.The question is if LFR is as easy as an Open World boss or Event then what is the point in it?If two things are equal but one of them is repeated 4 times what is the reason to keep it?
Just take all rewards given from the LFR and put them in Open world.Scrap the LFR concept and balance the other 3 difficulties.

The only sensible replacement for LFR would be a literal story mode where you just go in and raid with a bunch of NPCs to see the story. That is like 50% of the purpose of LFR. The gear is just an incentive to run it multiple times and give people a weekly lockout if they want to farm a (somewhat) decent looking set. Besides the bare minimum pretense of social interaction, it is also a pure money retention mechanic, because when they didn't have LFR drop shit, the casuals quit in droves because they had nothing to do. And no,none of them would ever bother to join a guild and structure their real life around a raid schedule, the vast majority of the silent majority does not play the game that way. People need to get that in their skulls, if you post here or even just read forums/reddit you are already orders of magnitude more dedicated than the average (paying!) customer.

[Malikath]

The only sensible replacement for LFR would be a literal story mode where you just go in and raid with a bunch of NPCs to see the story.

good thing MoP added scenarios for that.
bad thing it didn't remove phasing by putting all that shit into scripted solo-scenarios.

[Delever]

During the peak between Vanilla and Cata (2004 - 2010), millions and millions of people played WoW. 70% of new players during this time never made it past lvl10.
The retention rate of new players was abysmally bad even at the peak times of 11.5M subs. If you were faced with that kind of reality, wouldn't you try to discover what was wrong and try to change the experience to maybe retain some percentage of those players?

It's easy to analyze the whole thing in hindsight now, but at the time, I'm quite sure they had many serious meetings about retention rates and how to improve them.

How were retention rates terrible? They released stats every quarter and the playerbase was very stable and growing up untill the dungeon nerf patch of cata.

[Echeyakee]

That video has a lot of good ideas in it. Probably will not happen, and next expansion will be just more of the same, but we will see later this year, I guess.

[Malikath]

How were retention rates terrible? They released stats every quarter and the playerbase was very stable and growing up untill the dungeon nerf patch of cata.

if they're sub 10 it's probably just a smurf account that was made to make an add with it's corpse in Sw/Org.

[Schattenlied]

WoW 2.0

Stop calling it 2.0, WoW 2.0 happened already, it was Burning Crusade, what you are talking about is WoW 2.

2.0 denotes version, 2 means sequel, they are not the same thing.

[Shinrael]

You mean without the patronage of Blizzard he'd be yet another struggling vlogger looking for a gaming company teet to suckle from.

Lol. Nice facts there.

He has never released a game. He has couple of dudes locked in some Belfast flat "creating" a game. You know, one of those things that everyone and their hamster has been tinkering with ever since Unity became popular. That doesn't mean he knows anything at all about large multi-national companies, multi-lingual localizations/support. 24/7 IT, network and security operations, 15-20 year old codebases and datalayers that have probably trillions of records over 15 years of production use. In fact.., he knows nothing at all.

But sure. You don't need any of that to post opinions on youtube, pretending to be "gaming industry analyst" of some sort.

He doesn't know about large multi-national companies? Multi-lingual localizations/support? Network and security operations? Hello? we are talking game design here, not company management? And by the way, do you think the 3 people that founded Blizzard were any different from him now when they first started 25 years ago? They were still in university lol. They had nothing and started small but made masterpiece after masterpiece.

you seem to miss read what I said, I DONT want wow2. I dont think a wow2 should be anything because I think it shouldnt even be a thing.

And you still cling to your "WoW2" catchphrase without realising that it's that phrase we are trying to debunk. It's not WoW 2. It's just an expansion. One bit more revolutional than Cata/Legion. But sure, call it WoW2 and then tell me we don't need WoW2. That will certainly get us far.

Isn't the point. The point was the absolute nonsense that is 'OMG BELLULAR PUT OUT DIS VIDEO BLIZZ MUST DO EXACTLY THIS IT WILL HAPPEN.'

WoW is a game played by millions of people with countless preferences and ideas. There is no one guy or gal out there, there is no one video, that presents the perfect vision of the existing game or of an imaginary sequel that is (almost certainly) never going to happen. Why on earth would Blizz toss 15 years worth of WoW when it is arguably as relevant now as it has ever been? Because <insert streamer name> said they should?

Well, I didn't say they "must" did I? I enjoyed his video and have been wishing for a World revamp for like 8 years now. I have my own ideas and his just happened to vaguely describe some of mine, that is all. People hate on him unnecessarily without focusing on what is important - WoW needs something revolutional. SURE it is doing fine. I am proud of being a WoW player. But can it be even better? Hell yes. Now is the best chance to rise up again. Why are you so against daydreaming about it?

[Triceron]

The only sensible replacement for LFR would be a literal story mode where you just go in and raid with a bunch of NPCs to see the story. That is like 50% of the purpose of LFR. The gear is just an incentive to run it multiple times and give people a weekly lockout if they want to farm a (somewhat) decent looking set. Besides the bare minimum pretense of social interaction, it is also a pure money retention mechanic, because when they didn't have LFR drop shit, the casuals quit in droves because they had nothing to do. And no,none of them would ever bother to join a guild and structure their real life around a raid schedule, the vast majority of the silent majority does not play the game that way. People need to get that in their skulls, if you post here or even just read forums/reddit you are already orders of magnitude more dedicated than the average (paying!) customer.

That's why I think they went in the wrong direction of doubling-down on raid content while leaving the rest of the world a secondary means of progression.

The game should really have a Timeless Isle feel to it, applied continent-wide and not just brought in through a minizone like Mechagon.

[Sluvs]

Guys, guys.

Watch the video, he is not saying a new game called WoW 2 would happen. He is saying that WoW 2.0 would happen through another expansion, and he even says that it has already happened before.

Cmon.

OT, I think some thing he presents are fairly interesting, he pointed several problems but i do not know if the way he proposes to fix them works.

I think it was Mark Rosewater or GC who said best: Players are 100% right about the problems that the game has. But are 100% wrong on how to fix them.

Even if he is in the industry, he is still an outsider. But hey, some of his ideas are cool.

[Zyrinx]

There really should be a forum rule that you need to tldr; the video.

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That's why I think they went in the wrong direction of doubling-down on raid content while leaving the rest of the world a secondary means of progression.

The game should really have a Timeless Isle feel to it, applied continent-wide and not just brought in through a minizone like Mechagon.

This, I agree with.

[paralleluniverse]

Hardly well received, it was with it that WoW started it downfall. I remember the memes how it was truly a cataclysm to WoW. People were initially curious about world changes but everything else was a mess. They gutted tons of spells and unique skills. It was a total diferent game from the previous expacs. The retcon and ressurection of previous villains was also horrible.

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Yeah, this. The new talent system was truly underwhelming, heartbreaking even.

No such memes existed.

In Cata, the overwhelming complaint was that dungeons were too hard. If people quitted, it was for that.

Class changes were minimal. The new talent system came in Mists, not Cata.

[Kithelle]

WoW 2 is not happening. And Blizzard doesn't need to get back to anything now that they do have classic.

Yeah and once that dies down and people are bored to death with how trivial it is and will never evolve, we have to return to reality and fix retail instead of sticking our heads in the sand.

[Nefastus]

No such memes existed.

In Cata, the overwhelming complaint was that dungeons were too hard. If people quitted, it was for that.

Class changes were minimal. The new talent system came in Mists, not Cata.

Yeah, they did. Calling it the cataclysm of wow and catrash was common. Talent gutting came with cataclysm and complains were plenty since its release. Probably people quit over dungeons as well but that was hardly the main reason. Dungeons were hard since classic, TBC as well. Of course there were easy ones once in a while but easy mode game came after Wrath.

[TwoMana]

How were retention rates terrible? They released stats every quarter and the playerbase was very stable and growing up untill the dungeon nerf patch of cata.

At 10th anniversary 90M people had played WoW. Subs were nowhere near that number, ever. If 70% of new players never got past level 10, that's also quite bad.

[Delever]

if they're sub 10 it's probably just a smurf account that was made to make an add with it's corpse in Sw/Org.

They counted active subs not characters made or trial accounts.

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At 10th anniversary 90M people had played WoW. Subs were nowhere near that number, ever. If 70% of new players never got past level 10, that's also quite bad.

That doesnt answer my question. Quarterly reports reported numbers of ACTIVE subscribers. Not accounts that had been made. Untill they stopped releasing them later on.

[TwoMana]

He doesn't know about large multi-national companies? Multi-lingual localizations/support? Network and security operations? Hello? we are talking game design here, not company management?

When you argue about making changes to WoW, those are all things that the project team making the changes needs to take into account.

And by the way, do you think the 3 people that founded Blizzard were any different from him now when they first started 25 years ago? They were still in university lol. They had nothing and started small but made masterpiece after masterpiece.

Look at the games they made back then. Now look at WoW. They are not the same.
If Bellular wants to make a small two-man indie game, that's fine. But he's arguing about making changes to WoW. That's quite different.

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That doesnt answer my question. Quarterly reports reported numbers of ACTIVE subscribers. Not accounts that had been made. Untill they stopped releasing them later on.

The anniversary number is "unique players" - it's not random accounts. The retention rate at was horrible - but active subs grew, because the total amount of people trying the game was massive. And the 70% number was given by Mike Morhaime in quarterly investors call.

[Shinrael]

When you argue about making changes to WoW, those are all things that the project team making the changes needs to take into account.

Look at the games they made back then. Now look at WoW. They are not the same.
If Bellular wants to make a small two-man indie game, that's fine. But he's arguing about making changes to WoW. That's quite different.

Can you give an example of how those spheres can affect game design? "Well, our new art employees are from Germany so we have to add a Cross-realm Sharding tech to let Germans play with English server players?" I mean, it probably doesn't work like that, so please enlighten me.

They didn't have the tech and the people back then. Now they do. Their initial games would have looked different had they been made in our era. It's too much of an era leap. Let us compare Vanilla and current WoW. And let me be straight: Both have a shit ton of problems. Still, the artstyle, the music, the story, the aesthetics are far too good and it is my favourite game of all times. Those spheres have only improved since Vanilla times so I am still here, playing BFA and whatever else they give me. But that doesn't mean that the problematic spheres cannot be improved? It is precisely the Indie games that shine with creative design and unique RPG elements, because they have creative freedom and innovative and talented people. New and risky ideas are what decides how succesful they are. What they lack is the money and personel. Which is what WoW/Blizzard have in abundance. Then why did they strip away so many of its RPG elements? Why are people only able to argue which is better - Vanilla or BFA? Why can't they see that there are problems and pluses in both? Why do people immedietely show their forks and fangs when someone dares to suggest new ideas be implemented to our beloved game? Sure, they might not have the experience or means but... how can you possibly dismiss their ideas just because of that? NOBODY has the experience and means before they start. That doesn't mean they can't succeed if they do start?

[anon5123]

Classic is WoW, retail is WoW 2.

We don't need an entirely separate "WoW 2".

[Malikath]

No such memes existed.

In Cata, the overwhelming complaint was that dungeons were too hard. If people quitted, it was for that.

Class changes were minimal. The new talent system came in Mists, not Cata.

what a load, cata removed alot of the niche talents and the 5 rank do nothings from the trees effectively making them straight-lines to the bottom.

and the only people who were complaining about dungeon difficulty were the LFG rejects who couldn't into CC= as much as thew were into the forums.
but then again you tried getting in on AGG on twitter with back then and failed at that too so who knows how badly those earthshapers wiped your LFGs if you think they were actually hard.

also "casualclysm" is a well-known meme, irregardless of the rock you typically live under.

[Nefastus]

what a load, cata removed alot of the niche talents and the 5 rank do nothings from the trees effectively making them straight-lines to the bottom.

and the only people who were complaining about dungeon difficulty were the LFG rejects who couldn't into CC= as much as thew were into the forums.
but then again you tried getting in on AGG on twitter with back then and failed at that too so who knows how badly those earthshapers wiped your LFGs if you think they were actually hard.

also "casualclysm" is a well-known meme, irregardless of the rock you typically live under.

Yeah, I was trying to tell him that but you did it better, thanks for explaining it to him, my english is kinda bad and maybe he didn't understand what I meant. Cataclysm was very poorly received, in fact the pre patch of it still during Wrath angered a lot of people.