Blizzard didn't destroy WoW. The community did.

[MoanaLisa]

Y'all want Blizzard to start making great game again? Fine.

Blizzard should go back to how they treated the community back when they were making great games. Largely that consisted of not talking to a lot to them and listening even less. Social media is now a firehose of people giving them "advice", most of it directly contradictory to other advice they get. They should just shut all of that shit off, sit down and start talking among themselves about what makes great games and stop pandering to their customers contradictory whims and nostalgia.

My unasked for advice to them: start worrying more about stories. Big stories, little stories, connected stories, standalone stories. MMO's are about stories at the end of the day. They're not about hair-splitting theory-crafting of classes that are only played perfectly by a percentage of players in the low single digits. Stop with that bullshit and start making stories that exist in the world. People read books, go to the movies, etc. for the stories. They can occasionally admire the technical skill that goes into them but without a story it doesn't last. WoW is a little like that: heavy on the engineering at the expense of meaningful stories that have depth and occasional subtlety.

Stories are universal. The number of people who really care deeply about the percentage chance for a proc in combination with another proc is so tiny as to really be unnoticeable.

Classic works not so much because there's some big over-arching story. It works because the stories tend to be small and disconnected. Everyone remembers "Mankrik's Wife". Well, there you go. Tiny story that everyone who has ever played probably knows or has heard of. It also works because you have to stay awake to play it properly. You can't exactly sleepwalk through things. They're not always difficult but the game will let you know if you stop paying attention. That's about right.

More of that.

[Kiri]

You're forgetting about the literal countless threads on how titanforging, LFR and verious other mechanics suck ass and yet are still in the game. By your logic, Blizzard have obviously listend to (implying they implement based on some complaints they've read vs coincidentally coming up with something that one of their millions of subs happened to make a thread about) some of the worst feedback and ignored some of the most verbose and uninimous feedback. Their game is shit and they've no one to blame but themselves for pandering to the lowest common denominator.

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Moronic statement. We've got 2 40 man raid teams both clearing MC and Ony in 2 hours each wednesday. There still isn't enough time in the day to do a fraction of what else there is to do in classic. If all you're playing classic for is to raidlog on your main, then what the fuck do you expect?

I think the issue there would be conflating the forum community and the actual, in many cases playing, WoW community. Sure, someone complains about TF and LFR every day on the forums, starting up the very same discussions. But that is not the only feedback the devs get. They can also see what and how users play the game. If even a majority of people was against LFR then, well, next to no one would be playing it. Blizz did listen to people who complained that they felt like they needed to do LFR for certain things like important quests and made it pretty much completely optional by now. And yet, there are still people playing the mode, probably enjoying it.
The same is true for titanforging, which is meant to give an incentive to people to re-run lower difficulties with others that still need to gear up. While it has its faults, you do see quite a few overgeared people doing HC or such in the hopes of a proc, making it easier for groups to form. They do seem to be reacting to the RNG complaints though with that new corrupted stuff, so that is good, too.

There aren't countless threads on the issue and the feedback is usually not unanimous. Heck, you and I probably disagree on how much of an issue these things are and how to best fix them. That's saying nothing about the thousands of players who just play the game and never post. They are all part of the community as well. And in their own way, they give feedback by playing the game.

[andrewjoy]

I dont agree .

It was a team effort.

[Jurwi]

Moronic statement. We've got 2 40 man raid teams both clearing MC and Ony in 2 hours each wednesday. There still isn't enough time in the day to do a fraction of what else there is to do in classic. If all you're playing classic for is to raidlog on your main, then what the fuck do you expect?

Of course there is unlimited things to do if you're just willing to repeat everything over and over. Outside of those 2 hours of raiding on your main, there just isn't.

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Classic works not so much because there's some big over-arching story. It works because the stories tend to be small and disconnected. Everyone remembers "Mankrik's Wife". Well, there you go. Tiny story that everyone who has ever played probably knows or has heard of. It also works because you have to stay awake to play it properly. You can't exactly sleepwalk through things. They're not always difficult but the game will let you know if you stop paying attention. That's about right.

More of that.

To be honest, Mankrik's wife became the meme it is today because there just wasn't proper information to be easily found to complete it back in the day. It was just a poorly designed quest, not so much interesting story.

[Raisei]

@anyone who doesnt think that wow is dying:
Why do you gyus think Blizz re-released classic?
Because we asked for it? Because its fun? Because they wantes to do us a favor?
Definitely not!
The reason is that the game was slowly dying (especially with the release of BFA)
Blizzard reached exactly what they wantes to: with classic, they kept the game alive and the people paying. Thats it.
Im not saying its a dumb move, it was a great move, cos a lot (and really a lot!) of people love classic, including me. I would have unsubbed in BFA definitely. However, I am still paying to play classic. So in a way of ‚leave the game at its originally state‘ is the right way to go, the only problem nowadays is the so called fast-paced-gaming style, there is the content problem for endgame. Im sure Blizz will come up with a solution even after all the phases, to keep the people paying.

They released Classic because Private Servers with illegal copies of their product were popular. They saw a way to make money of that as corporations are supposed to do. Hence they moved against private servers and gave the customers a substitute legal product, that would make them money. Now it is done and it will need very little further patches or content (the stuff in the phases is very likely done already, might just need a bit of polish), after all the players wanted it like Vanilla so it will be as bugged as Vanilla.

This is what a company refers to as a Cash Cow in economics. They can just milk the subs and do not have to invest more then a tiny amount to keep the servers running and once everything is stable maintenance will be left to interns. By definition the customers do not want the game to change or new content so Blizzard can just keep making money of this with no investment necessary.

It is an economical DREAM for a company to have such a product and it had nothing whatsoever to do with WoW retail dying.

WoW is still the most-played, most popular MMORPG out there. Many have tried to gain the status of a WoW Killer, sometimes with ridiculously powerful licenses behind them (see SWTOR, which is getting less content in a full expansion these days then WoW gets in one mid-expansion patch), some really fresh new ideas (see TSW/TSWLegends, which had to be rebooted for failing to make money only to become a horrific cash grab grinder game).
The only MMOs that can even be called remotely successful are GW2 (which is running fine but suffers from some problems in storytelling) and FFXIV.

That WoW is constanty dying (pretty much since Vanilla) is a myth created by people who are no longer satisfied with the direction of the game, that are stuck in the past and fear or hate changes to how they feel WoW should be. Best example is those people endlessly complaining about Calia, Sylvanas and the Forsaken situation. They cannot accept that things are changing for the Forsaken and hate the game now because it's not "their" WoW anymore. Classic is the perfect place for these folks, I feel. No changes gonna happen, infinite stagnation is the plan

As a sidenote: The retail players definately appreciate the people paying a sub to play Classic. That money can be used to develop new content for retail, and you do no longer have to listen to "Vanilla was so much better" talk in general chat. I love Classic

[Lane]

You say that the problem is that the game has changed, but the real problem is that the game hasn't changed enough, people want to play, actually play, that means doing the content, not walking around aimlessly or speaking to strangers.

This.

The problem, as I see it, is the lead devs of Blizzard are of the pre-WoW MMO era and they enjoyed that. If you never played an MMO before WoW then you have no idea how super casual vanilla WoW actually was. It seemed like up until Cataclysm that Blizzard was improving upon accessibility and, at that time, they were copying ideas from competitors and improving upon them. However, at some point that stopped. I don't remember the last time Blizzard incorporated an idea from another MMO, in fact, they're seemingly Hell bent against many QoL improvements that are almost standard in other MMOs, like waypoints. They don't want flying let alone fast travel, something that would allow players to more speedily be engaged in an activity rather than alt+tabbing while being forced to traverse through a world that no longer holds any purpose once you've finished questing. WoW is also the only MMO I know of that doesn't have dynamic events, something that would give the outside world value and something to miss if you flew over it.

WoW also has a nasty habit of trying to strong arm everyone into the same activities. As an example, one of the reasons you get people who want to steamroll dungeons vs. those who want a challenge is because the first half most likely don't want to be there, but Blizzard's given them no alternate path to accomplish their goals so they just want to get it over with ASAP. This isn't the community's fault, this is poor psychology on the dev's part. I remember reading that MTV when casting for The Real World would hire psychologists to pick out 7 of the most incompatible personality types to live together for maximum drama. This is partly where your toxicity is coming from, different player personalities all being funneled into the same progression path. This is all aside from the fact that, for whatever reason, Blizzard perpetuates systems that weren't well loved in the first place like mission tables, AP, etc.

I don't know what players Blizzard are actually listening to because it's clearly not ones like me. I do believe they listen, they're just not interested in making the changes. I think that they're developing the type of game that they enjoy (dated, IMO) and we can take it or leave it. I'm not convinced players have much of a say in anything and I feel that's been displayed time and again short of the exodus with the no flying ever announcement where financial loss was involved. Personally, I feel Blizzard needs young blood at the dev table who aren't tainted by memories of MMOs of old.

[OriginalName]

WoW community/playerbase has never been a monolith in its opinions and desires, "the community" did destroy WoW, question is, which community did blizzard listen the most to over the years?

[rips]

Classic WoW was designed by Blizzard devs. As stated by Chris Metzen, in Classic WoW the World is the main character. It was the "World" of Warcraft.

Battle for Azeroth on the other hand was designed by the WoW playerbase. That is the MMORPG this community ended up designing. All the complaints and demands by members of forums like MMOChampion are what created Battle for Azeroth.

Now how did we get here? Why is Retail WoW no longer an MMO or an RPG? Why is the World gone? Why has Retail became a singleplayer lobby based game? Because the playerbase demanded it to be this way.

When did this shift begin? It actually began midway through Vanilla. Players began complaining about Battlegrounds. They didn't want to have to run to the instance portals in Arathi Highlands, Alterac Mountains, or Ashenvale. They wanted to queue for every battleground at once. They wanted to teleport to the instances and not have to wait. Blizzard caved in. They added Battlemasters which allowed players to teleport into instances across the world. Instead of running across the world zones, you could now teleport past them. You now had players standing in the same spot in Ironforge and Orgrimmar queueing over and over again without leaving the room. This was only the beginning.

The Burning Crusade brought flying mounts. The community thought it would be an "awesome" idea. Land mounts were too slow and clumsy. This not only shrunk the world, but also lessened player interaction in the zones. Compare your experience riding your mount through Kalimdor in Classic to using a flightmaster to fly across it. Flying literally allowed players to bypass the World. Imagine flying at 280% speed compared to running at 60% on land. There are literally members on this forum arguing that flying mounts increased player interaction and World PvP. How delusional can you be? Blizzard capitulated to players like this.


Players complained. Wrath of the King gave us crossrealm dungeon finder.

Players complained. Cataclysm gave us crossrealm raidfinder.

Players complained. WoD gave us sharded crossrealm zones.

Communities like MMO-Champion are what spawned something as lifeless as Battle for Azeroth.

thank fucking whoever for the Groupfinder. I had enough spamming tradechat

[Jurwi]

his is all aside from the fact that, for whatever reason, Blizzard perpetuates systems that weren't well loved in the first place like mission tables, AP, etc.

Both of those are basically endless grinds, do you really need a reasoning to their existence? You are very much correct about them not being well loved though. Repetitive grinds are never fun, at least for me. But hey, I've heard some ppl even claiming that Classic endgame has more "content" with the argument that you can grind gold.

[Asaliah]

Blizzard "downfall" from Grace came once they merged with the Devil himself, the Lord of Charisma, The NASDAQ Hottest Body, the Fabio of Gaming, Bobby Kotick.

[Rigald]

The Activision merger was after WOTLK.

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This mentality is so wrong, and I hear it so much from Retail players. It is an MMORPG. Massively Multiplayer. You actions affect those of other players. If you use LFD or LFR or Battlemasters or flying mounts, you are removing yourself from the world zones. That is one less player to interact with in the world.
If you were the only player not using these tools, then you would be in an empty world.

This is pure FACTS, well done sir

[Sharein]

Players complained. Wrath of the King gave us crossrealm dungeon finder.

Players complained. Cataclysm gave us crossrealm raidfinder.

With shrinking server populations these tools are a necessity to do content if you are on a smaller server. No one wants to spend more time looking for a group than it takes to finish the dungeon. This is especially true after the dungeons got a lot shorter after TBC.

The game would have been long dead without x-realm group finders.

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It's not the community who asked for specs to be gutted.
It's not the community who asked for every spec to feel like a complete different class.
It's not the community who asked for WF/TF RNG bullshit.
It's not the community who asked for warfronts and island expeditions.
It's not the community who asked for mindless infinite artifact power grind for generic traits.

Nonsense. The "community" has never been an united voice. You are the perfect example of your own medicine, communicating as if the entire community thinks alike and that your opinion is the universal truth.

[Aphrel]

Classic WoW was designed by Blizzard devs. As stated by Chris Metzen, in Classic WoW the World is the main character. It was the "World" of Warcraft.

Battle for Azeroth on the other hand was designed by the WoW playerbase. That is the MMORPG this community ended up designing. All the complaints and demands by members of forums like MMOChampion are what created Battle for Azeroth.

Now how did we get here? Why is Retail WoW no longer an MMO or an RPG? Why is the World gone? Why has Retail became a singleplayer lobby based game? Because the playerbase demanded it to be this way.

When did this shift begin? It actually began midway through Vanilla. Players began complaining about Battlegrounds. They didn't want to have to run to the instance portals in Arathi Highlands, Alterac Mountains, or Ashenvale. They wanted to queue for every battleground at once. They wanted to teleport to the instances and not have to wait. Blizzard caved in. They added Battlemasters which allowed players to teleport into instances across the world. Instead of running across the world zones, you could now teleport past them. You now had players standing in the same spot in Ironforge and Orgrimmar queueing over and over again without leaving the room. This was only the beginning.

The Burning Crusade brought flying mounts. The community thought it would be an "awesome" idea. Land mounts were too slow and clumsy. This not only shrunk the world, but also lessened player interaction in the zones. Compare your experience riding your mount through Kalimdor in Classic to using a flightmaster to fly across it. Flying literally allowed players to bypass the World. Imagine flying at 280% speed compared to running at 60% on land. There are literally members on this forum arguing that flying mounts increased player interaction and World PvP. How delusional can you be? Blizzard capitulated to players like this.


Players complained. Wrath of the King gave us crossrealm dungeon finder.

Players complained. Cataclysm gave us crossrealm raidfinder.

Players complained. WoD gave us sharded crossrealm zones.

Communities like MMO-Champion are what spawned something as lifeless as Battle for Azeroth.

1. bgs wasnt crossrealm at the time. And with the very long quetimers to wsg for the dominating faction on that server. I can very much understand the desire to be able to que for serveral bgs at once. Already in vanilla wsg became something ppl almost never ran simply because ab was more popular. So players gravitated towards quing for ab leading to longer ques in wsg further incentivicing players to do ab and so on.
Only after this change happend did wsg once again become similarly popular as arthi basin.

2. Very many players had great doubt about flying mounts, saying it was gamebreaking even be4 tbc released. It was a bad idea back then and it still is now.

3. Players were asking for a group finder feature, staring at a chat is indeed quite tiresome. Blizz did the incredibly stupid decision to make an automated matchmaking system out of nowhere when no1 was asking for it.

4. Litterarly NO1 was asking for LFR, it was sprung out of nowhere suprising everyone and it didnt take more than 5 seconds for a very large part of the wow community to instantly dislike the idea as they already disliked the matchmaking dungeonfidner.

5. Many players were stuck on dead servers, unable to play many of the games best features (raids, challengemodes) This change needed to happen. It gave us the best feature we have. The custom group finder. The very thing we wanted in wrath.
As for the implementation, well ofc it was catastrophicly bad in every regard. But the ability to play with players from other servers was a thing wow very much needed at this point.

Something to keep in mind. No1 asked for the azerite system, no1 asked to have cooldowns take off gcd, no1 asked to have a pointless ap grind that you cant even speed up without heavy penaties, no1 asked for the random drop legendaries in legion.
Infact, the players outcry should have saved us from that fiasco because it took most veterans of wow about 10 seconds to realize what a horrible system that was even be4 we got the beta invites. Yet nothing changed, and about half a year later while legion was live it was discovered that we had been lied to aswell and that for every legendary item that dropped the grind to the next became longer. Now the outcry turned into an outrage. And even then it took several more months (until nighthold patch) until the actually made the damn things farmable.

Tl;dr Its not the players fault, its 100% the lead designers of wow that is to blame.

[Gasparde]

Yeye, I totally remember the community as a whole (not just 5 people, nope, the whole community in unison) asking for shit like LFR... or the shitty ass Artifact system that became a pointless boring and mundane grind after 2 days. I can precisely remember the community asking for exactly that.

It's definitely not been 'the community' asking for something and Blizzard then completely shooting past the target. Nope. It's the community asking for corrupted kiss/curse gear. The forums were literally filled with it. It's most certainly not Blizzard just being out of touch with what the actual playerbase wants instead of what a bunch of random loudmouths want... and then completely shitting the bed by coming up with something no one actually asked for.

[bloodkin]

Blizzard was _ALWAYS_ a thief regarding ideas. Everything including TLV and Warcraft1.
Then Blizzard killed the competition, by stealing the best ideas and polishing them. The polish was marvellous, almost bugfree, fast responsiveness in combat, you name it.

Seeing WoW's success (which was primarily because Wacraft3 and the Blizzard trademark), other studios just wanted to copy the game. But they couldn't beat Blizzard in it's own game.
Unfortunately this meant that innovation in the MMO genre just died. Blizzard had nowhere to look for new mechanics, and all their decisions (gameplay!) was based on one thing only: keeping MAU's as high as possible, while maximizing profits.

Just.. just look at the mess bfa is. If this was released in 2005, Blizzard would have been dead already.

I think you make a good point, Blizz has always been very good at polishing and perfecting existing ideas and concepts, their strength was improving what's already on the market. This works really well wen you have a vibrant and healthy market and good competition, but falls apart as soon as the market dies out and there's no competition with good original ideas to copy and improve/polish. This eventually forces blizz to try to come up with something unique and new, but all we get is regurgitated stuff for the last 3 expansions that just fall flat or don't work. In this respect, Legion is an anomaly, and most likely had the last remnants of good story they kept for a rainy day used up.

So, this also doesn't make it so surprising that blizz just tries to reset the clock and releasing classic. There's been an increasing demand for it as the quality of retail only sank deeper. Chances are that they might re release expansions up to Wrath of the Lich king, if the money keeps coming in.

[Hyral]

Players complained. Wrath of the King gave us crossrealm dungeon finder.

That's what did it. The community didn't implement that, they are literally incapable of doing that. Literally.

[Sencha]

So. Much. True.

[erifwodahs]

1. bgs wasnt crossrealm at the time. And with the very long quetimers to wsg for the dominating faction on that server. I can very much understand the desire to be able to que for serveral bgs at once. Already in vanilla wsg became something ppl almost never ran simply because ab was more popular. So players gravitated towards quing for ab leading to longer ques in wsg further incentivicing players to do ab and so on.
Only after this change happend did wsg once again become similarly popular as arthi basin.

2. Very many players had great doubt about flying mounts, saying it was gamebreaking even be4 tbc released. It was a bad idea back then and it still is now.

3. Players were asking for a group finder feature, staring at a chat is indeed quite tiresome. Blizz did the incredibly stupid decision to make an automated matchmaking system out of nowhere when no1 was asking for it.

4. Litterarly NO1 was asking for LFR, it was sprung out of nowhere suprising everyone and it didnt take more than 5 seconds for a very large part of the wow community to instantly dislike the idea as they already disliked the matchmaking dungeonfidner.

5. Many players were stuck on dead servers, unable to play many of the games best features (raids, challengemodes) This change needed to happen. It gave us the best feature we have. The custom group finder. The very thing we wanted in wrath.
As for the implementation, well ofc it was catastrophicly bad in every regard. But the ability to play with players from other servers was a thing wow very much needed at this point.

Something to keep in mind. No1 asked for the azerite system, no1 asked to have cooldowns take off gcd, no1 asked to have a pointless ap grind that you cant even speed up without heavy penaties, no1 asked for the random drop legendaries in legion.
Infact, the players outcry should have saved us from that fiasco because it took most veterans of wow about 10 seconds to realize what a horrible system that was even be4 we got the beta invites. Yet nothing changed, and about half a year later while legion was live it was discovered that we had been lied to aswell and that for every legendary item that dropped the grind to the next became longer. Now the outcry turned into an outrage. And even then it took several more months (until nighthold patch) until the actually made the damn things farmable.

Tl;dr Its not the players fault, its 100% the lead designers of wow that is to blame.

Sure, no one asked for anything in that case, and game should be the same as 2004 then. We get the good, we get the bad. Great raids, way improved classes compared to vanilla/tbc, alt friendly environment, things for advanced pve players/pvp players, collector players, achiever players... Those all are developer's blame then as well. Classic wow should be dev's blame too then. Because for each of your points you could find some group of players who asked for it, and some group was against it.
M+ is best what has happened to the game since actual progression raiding was created, but some blame it as a failure of wow. Oh well!

[pharma]

How hard is it to understand that the game keeps evolving for better.

Players complained. Wrath of the King gave us crossrealm dungeon finder. NOT EVERYONE HAS 2 HOURS OF FREE TIME TO FIND A GROUP TO CLEAR A DUNGEON
Players complained. Cataclysm gave us crossrealm raidfinder. NOT EVERYONE HAS SKILL TO RAID NORMAL AND SEE THE DAMN STORY/CONTENT THAT FOR WHAT THEY'VE PAYED FOR
Players complained. WoD gave us sharded crossrealm zones. TO RESOLVE OVER/UNDER POPULATED REALMS, HAD TO BE DONE - DESTROYED SERVER IDENTITY, ALSO FORCING PLAYERS TO SWITCH SERVERS WOULD HAVE THE SAME OUTCOME.

The game is played by the community, the same community that pays for the game, the same community that keeps the game alive... therefor the community HAS to be pleased.

Always remember that probably 90% of all the negative/complaining posts about those features are made by a minority of the community.

[Aphrel]

Sure, no one asked for anything in that case, and game should be the same as 2004 then. We get the good, we get the bad. Great raids, way improved classes compared to vanilla/tbc, alt friendly environment, things for advanced pve players/pvp players, collector players, achiever players... Those all are developer's blame then as well. Classic wow should be dev's blame too then. Because for each of your points you could find some group of players who asked for it, and some group was against it.
M+ is best what has happened to the game since actual progression raiding was created, but some blame it as a failure of wow. Oh well!

Ah i see you are catching on. Yes, the developers is responsible for wow. Not the playerbase. We are in agreement.