Why is BFA hated ?

[Tradu]

Not at all. What about all the feedback that they listened to which resulted in correct decisions? Or the mountains of terrible feedback that they correctly ignored?

Just because you have the benefit of hindsight does not mean that there was any rational basis for Blizzard to have known what was "correct" at the time. As I said, feedback is never unanimous or homogeneous. You're just operating on confirmation bias.

Legiondaries, AP, azerite, essences, AP again, an absurd amount of class design/balancing, corruption etc. It's not hindsight or confirmation bias, it's Blizzard consistently ignoring feedback that should be blindingly obvious and they don't learn from past mistakes.

[arandomuser]

I think bfa is a decent expac, in fact i think its better than cataclysm
and on par with MOP
people hate it because their favorite influencer told them to
those same "influencers" stanned classic for years and years also but i dont see them on classic anymore do i? instead they are in the alpha with their "friends and family" invite getting blizzard to make the game more like classic..which they mostly quit a couple of months in

[docterfreeze]

Can't really comment since I don't compete at a high level in PvP. That being said, if you're looking for a serious PvP game, I'd suggest another genre of game. WoW is an RPG after.

Was wrath-MoP a fluke then? WoW had some of the best PvP on the market back then. People still play WoW solely for arena since there's nothing else like it. People like swifty, reckful, sodapoppin, and cdew are now millionaires because of the popularity they garnered from PvPing in WoW. Countless others continue to make a living from it. Even some games played at EVO can't claim that.

So no, it being an RPG doesn't automatically make it a bad PvP game. If it was good in the past there's no reason why they couldn't have kept it good.

[Tiwack]

Pointless war and frustrating new systems made for some annoying experiences while it still was beautiful and fun where it needed to be. It's not hated, it's like every other expansion a mixed bag with stuff working out and other stuff failing miserably at what they were aiming for.

[Mendzia]

Don't presume to speak for everyone. Or even for the majority. Because you don't.

Check how many people already said in the first page of this thread that they do not like these new systems.

Not really.

Such strong couter argument here, bravo!

As they should be once they're done. Every tier is relevant while it's current, and that is what matters.

According to who? You?
I will use your argument: not really.

Can't really comment since I don't compete at a high level in PvP. That being said, if you're looking for a serious PvP game, I'd suggest another genre of game. WoW is an RPG after.

I agree 100%.
I always thought WoW is mainly PvE game and if you want to PvP you should find other games.
Still for many other people PvP is the 'main thing' in this game and it hard to find any posts/thread with people being happy about it. Especially if they still want to continue making WoW arena as e-sport.

None of which are anywhere close to mandatory. The microtransaction model of WoW is pretty much win-win for everyone because it allows Blizzard to maintain their revenue stream at the expense of willing spenders while keeping costs down for the rest of us while still maintaining their dev budget.

Honestly, there is no good reason to dislike microtransactions because either you like it and make use of it, or you ignore it entirely (while reaping the benefits of lower costs and a better game).

I already responded to many people in other threads about 'do not like it do not buy it' argument so saying this again is probaly is waste of time.
I will not convince you that microtransactions are just cancerous in gaming industry anyway.

Or maybe they are side content that people placed too many expectations on. Fair enough, Blizzard are largely responsible for hyping these features, but if you take a step back, they only add to the game - even if not as much as some people were hoping.

So... it is players fault wanting it to be great instead Blizzard making them dogshit? Interesting...

Yeah, this is by far your most egregious comment.

Blizzard do listen to feedback. But feedback is not, nor has it ever been unanimous or homogeneous. At best you could argue that they don't listen to the correct feedback, but if you're being honest, they don't listen to your feedback.

*Cough* Master looter...*cough* atleast in guild runs... pleasee...

[Raelbo]

Legiondaries, AP, azerite, essences, AP again, an absurd amount of class design/balancing, corruption etc. It's not hindsight or confirmation bias, it's Blizzard consistently ignoring feedback that should be blindingly obvious and they don't learn from past mistakes.

On none of those issues was there ever a unanimous voice of how exactly they should be addressed. Very often people even had polar opposite feedback. So yes, this is definitely a case of confirmation bias.

Yes, Blizzard dismiss a lot of feedback. Most of it is utter shite. But in there, yes, there is also good feedback that is dismissed. And some of it turns out, in hindsight, to have been good feedback.

That does not mean that they "ignore" feedback.

[Lolites]

bcs its current, so its worst expansion, give it couple years and it will be amazing expansion

[Soon-TM]

bcs its current, so its worst expansion, give it couple years and it will be amazing expansion

Not really, WoD happened several years ago, and it's still considered pretty much the worst xpac ever. Cata is even older, and you will have a hard time finding people who think it was better than WotLK or even MoP.

[Raelbo]

Check how many people already said in the first page of this thread that they do not like these new systems.

Yes, it's called a vocal minority. WoW has millions of players, of which only a tiny fraction are represented here on MMO-C. You have no basis for claiming that anything said on this site is representative of the player base at large.

Such strong couter argument here, bravo!

As if there was actually an argument to counter in the first place Present an argument, as opposed to an unsubstantiated statement, and I'll counter accordingly.

According to who? You?

According to common sense. Since when was any tier "irrelevant" while it's current? And why on earth should it remain relevant after a new tier has dropped?

I already responded to many people in other threads about 'do not like it do not buy it' argument so saying this again is probaly is waste of time.
I will not convince you that microtransactions are just cancerous in gaming industry anyway.

If you had a good argument you would. But that seems unlikely because while many on the forum share your opinion, I have yet to see a decent reason why, and plenty of bad arguments eg:

People will argue that putting items in the shop takes them out of the game. Completely illogical argument because it assumes that said item would have existed without the shop. Whereas to anyone good at logic, it's pretty obvious that you remove the shop and you're going to lose even more.
People also argue that it's bad because it's P2W and then spend the entire thread trying to define the shop as P2W - which is basically just a strawmanining.

So... it is players fault wanting it to be great instead Blizzard making them dogshit? Interesting...

TBH I don't know what people were expecting. Maybe some people were hoping for something to replace raiding, dungeons, battlegrounds and world quests. I always just saw them as something to supplement play though, not to replace existing features.

*Cough* Master looter...*cough* atleast in guild runs... pleasee...

While I realise that the Master Looter decision is unpopular around here, you cannot claim that Blizzard didn't listen to feedback. The whole basis of their decision to move to PL is customer feedback - in the form of millions upon millions of GM tickets over many, many years regarding loot disputes.

[Soon-TM]

About numbers, noone can provide those since we dont know actual subscriber numbers.

So you don't have numbers, just some pretty contrived guesswork. Thanks for participating.

Hint: there being some highly populated servers here and there doesn't turn those players into the "silent majority" that you love to invoke but cannot offer proofs of. Back in WotLK and its glorious 12M subs, someone from Blizzard said there had been like 100M created accounts. Which means that 88M went out quietly, without saying a word in most cases. What is the majority, again?

[zmp]

Not sure if totally bad. Better question would be: Will Shadowlands live up to the success of BFA?

[Monolithi]

Because some people are prone to exaggeration.

Overall I think that BfA is actually a pretty decent expansion. While it certainly has it's fair share of problems, they're not nearly as bad as some people would like to make out.

The first problem BfA has, that it was always going to have, is that it follows a brilliant expansion in Legion. Blizzard were faced with a tough proposition: Change a great formula and risk a disaster, or stick with what worked well and risk living in the shadow of Legion. They were conservative and decided to keep the Legion formula, the result of which was a Legion like game that wasn't as good as Legion.

The second problem was the premise of going back to a faction conflict story line. For some reason Blizzard seem to be stuck in this mode of thinking that war between the Alliance and Horde is what holds the game together. I disagree, and I think the idea of perpetual conflict is stupid and that the factions can move beyond such foolishness. I honestly don't think that "faction pride" is what drives players either, nor that dividing the playerbase is healthy or wise. Blizzard need to invent a way for us to have faction pride without the need to wage actual war on the other faction.

Personally I think that the faction conflict detracted from a pretty decent storyline about Azeroth's wound/Azshara/N'zoth, and things like burning Teldrassil, razing Undercity, butchering Sylvanas into Garrosh V2.0 just turned a lot of people off.

Other than that I think it's a pretty solid expansion, building on a lot of the groundwork that Legion laid. And if you look at the arguments about things that people like to fixate on, it's pretty clear that these "major problems" are nothing more than minor issues:

Azerite gear: In the beginning of the expansion they had a few problems: Not enough Azerite Rings, and rings being locked behind AP. This was clearly not a case of a fundamentally broken concept, just one that had a few minor glitches which were easily sorted out.

"RNG on top of RNG": Such a senseless phrase. RNG is RNG. A tiny fraction of the players are pissed that they no longer have a BiS list to chase, even though it's pretty obvious that the game is much better off with it.

Warfronts: These are fun for what they are. But some people expected them to be something else entirely and are pissed. I still remember the incredible whinefest that occurred at the start of BfA when Horde were the first to have access to the Warfront and the supposed massive advantage it gave for raiding. But for all the fuss that people made for a week or so, it actually had almost zero impact and was soon forgotten about.

Islands: As with warfronts, I find them fun for what they are. But again, people expected them to be something more. On top of that, a small segment of the playerbase still hasn't figured out that you really don't need to grind AP to death, so they ended up grinding islands a lot more than was necessary and unsurprisingly now hate them. It's like Maw of Souls all over again....


And while we have players moaning about all the things they don't like about the new game features, most seem to ignore that when it comes to the core of the game, BfA delivers very strongly. The new zones are beautifully done with fine questing experiences, dungeons are good, raids are good.

Personally I have had a blast this expansion, playing WoW as I always have. And while the whole Sylvanas war story didn't appeal to me at all, it's not something that really detracted from my own gameplay.

I am not saying this expansion is perfect. It has it's fair share of flaws. But I stand resolute in my assertion that the amount of criticism levelled against it is completely unwarranted and says a lot more about the quality of the critics than it does about the game.

- - - Updated - - -



Don't presume to speak for everyone. Or even for the majority. Because you don't.



Not really.



As they should be once they're done. Every tier is relevant while it's current, and that is what matters.



Can't really comment since I don't compete at a high level in PvP. That being said, if you're looking for a serious PvP game, I'd suggest another genre of game. WoW is an RPG after.



None of which are anywhere close to mandatory. The microtransaction model of WoW is pretty much win-win for everyone because it allows Blizzard to maintain their revenue stream at the expense of willing spenders while keeping costs down for the rest of us while still maintaining their dev budget.

Honestly, there is no good reason to dislike microtransactions because either you like it and make use of it, or you ignore it entirely (while reaping the benefits of lower costs and a better game).



Can't argue with you there...



Or maybe they are side content that people placed too many expectations on. Fair enough, Blizzard are largely responsible for hyping these features, but if you take a step back, they only add to the game - even if not as much as some people were hoping.



Yeah, this is by far your most egregious comment.

Blizzard do listen to feedback. But feedback is not, nor has it ever been unanimous or homogeneous. At best you could argue that they don't listen to the correct feedback, but if you're being honest, they don't listen to your feedback.


By way of example: For me one of the biggest issues this expansion (as in the one that negatively impacted my enjoyment of the game the most) was their handling of flying and taking a whole year to allow us to take to the skies. That and the way they handled the final phase of pathfinder. Blizzard's anti-flying stance is informed almost entirely on the basis of listening to player feedback. And while I might have very strong arguments for why those were the wrong players to listen to, I can guarantee you that those players who argue against flying are just as adamant that their opinion is correct.

Pretty rational comment, nicely put. Cheers.

- - - Updated - - -

So you don't have numbers, just some pretty contrived guesswork. Thanks for participating.

Hint: there being some highly populated servers here and there doesn't turn those players into the "silent majority" that you love to invoke but cannot offer proofs of. Back in WotLK and its glorious 12M subs, someone from Blizzard said there had been like 100M created accounts. Which means that 88M went out quietly, without saying a word in most cases. What is the majority, again?

Number of active servers and bfa profits are numbers, official ones even. And they have their weight.
88M are just tourists accounts, people trying the game and didnt like it. Just like you and me trying cod, bf and other games we didnt like.

[Soon-TM]

Pretty rational comment, nicely put. Cheers.

- - - Updated - - -



Number of active servers and bfa profits are numbers, official ones even. And they have their weight.
88M are just tourists accounts, people trying the game and didnt like it. Just like you and me trying cod, bf and other games we didnt like.

That's all fine and dandy, but it doesn't change the fact that you don't know the reasons for people not to post in online forums. They can be "happily playing"... Or they dgaf anymore and simply left. And you don't have numbers on either of these groups, so stop conflating "people who don't post in forums" with "people happily playing", as if they were synonymous.

[Mendzia]

Yes, it's called a vocal minority. WoW has millions of players, of which only a tiny fraction are represented here on MMO-C. You have no basis for claiming that anything said on this site is representative of the player base at large.

Tiny fraction that are 'fanboys' enough to make thousands of posts so majority of people here should be positive about the game.

As if there was actually an argument to counter in the first place Present an argument, as opposed to an unsubstantiated statement, and I'll counter accordingly.

I do not need to use argument here in the first place.
1. OP wanted to hear opinions why is BFA hated.
2. I presented one of my points why I THINK it is bad.
3. Now you are trying to say that my OPINION is wrong in MY EYES.

Do you see the problem here?

According to common sense.

Oh... so now it is common sense. Somebody just said 'vocal minority'... nice.

Since when was any tier "irrelevant" while it's current? And why on earth should it remain relevant after a new tier has dropped?

During current patch doing Uldir, Dazar'Alar or even Azshara (ok you got one trinket here) is totally pointless.

If you had a good argument you would. But that seems unlikely because while many on the forum share your opinion, I have yet to see a decent reason why, and plenty of bad arguments eg:

People will argue that putting items in the shop takes them out of the game. Completely illogical argument because it assumes that said item would have existed without the shop. Whereas to anyone good at logic, it's pretty obvious that you remove the shop and you're going to lose even more.

No, i would not. Not anymore atleast. I did it too many times already.
As i said it is waste of time convincing people that all microtransations are cancerous.

People also argue that it's bad because it's P2W and then spend the entire thread trying to define the shop as P2W - which is basically just a strawmanining.

Where did i say anything about P2W?
Stop putting words to my mouth.
... and who is 'people'? 'Vocal minority'?

TBH I don't know what people were expecting. Maybe some people were hoping for something to replace raiding, dungeons, battlegrounds and world quests. I always just saw them as something to supplement play though, not to replace existing features.

Ok, so be honest now.
How many times did you do Warfronds and Islands just to have fun instead farming X mount or pet?

While I realise that the Master Looter decision is unpopular around here, you cannot claim that Blizzard didn't listen to feedback.

Master looter is just one of the many examples.

The whole basis of their decision to move to PL is customer feedback - in the form of millions upon millions of GM tickets over many, many years regarding loot disputes.

Oh... suddenly you are Blizzard employee that know it is 'milions' of tickets?
As i pointed the middle ground would be leaving ML just for guild runs and probably everyone is happy.

[Adam Jensen]

I do think it's the worst of those I played. I mean I still enjoy the game enough to play it but here's why I don't like it as much as others:

Corruption: A bad design. Period. An RNG system that can literally kill you. You can of course avoid corruption, if you want to sacrifice value DPS that is. I hate Thing From Beyond and I'm sick to death of that fucking eyeball. But if I drop my corruption, I lose DPS, I don't perform as well in raids.

Gear: The gear sets are horrible. Nya'lotha is by far the ugliest tier set produced. Worse is they took away class based gear and made it armor based instead. Which is stupid. I want my priest to look like a priest. I want my druid to look like a druid. Sure, I can transmog, but this is fucking lazy, one set of gear for all leatherwearers? Fuck off. Also, bring back set bonuses

Professions are weak. They removed half the enchants, all the armors, spellthreads and inscriptions that made many of the professions so vital, for "simplification" (and then gave us this "azerite trait" shit.) There's barely a reason for me to do JC except to make the occasional gem. Crafting professions can make gear for their toons . . . if they raid enough to build up the void focus, at which point they'll probably have better gear in that slot that doesn't require so much goddamn expulsom. And expulsom is utter fucking bullshit. A BoP item you only get, on occasion, that you need from scrapping, required in 30s-40s in every recipe? What was wrong with farming elementals for motes or volatiles like we did in 'nilla, BC, Wrath, Cata, and MoP? I could spend a few hours gathering mats and make something good for myself. Yeah there were recipes that required raids to do, but there were alternatives to those too. Back in Wrath I could get geared from crafting and be good enough for at least normal ICC.

Azerite Traits: Now every time i get a new piece, I literally have to sim because it's otherwise too much mental work to figure out if what I have is an upgrade or not. Back in the day, you could usually just tell by looking at the stats and knowing your class. But now it's impossible because there are so many possible combinations of this trait with that trait with these stats . . .

Oversimplification of fucking everything. Stacking defense was too hard I guess. Stacking spirit, mana per five, etc, I guess that made it too hard to be a healer. Just gonna whittle every thing down to as few stats as possible. This is an RPG for christ sake, what was wrong with the stats we started out with? The only one I don't miss is weapon skill. That should have never been in game. The rest were fine.

The story. Sylvie made Garrosh look like a well written villain. The Horde burns down Teldrassil? The Horde are a lot of things, but genocidal maniacs? Whatever happened to "savage but honorable?"

And then we have N'Zoth, the bad ass old god who was behind Deathwing's Madness and the entire Cataclysm expansion. A creature worthy of an entire expansion. We could have had the black empire come, revamp Azeroth again, or maybe we go into his realm or something, I don't know. But to release him and down him in one patch makes him seem a bit like a chump.

[Gaidax]

Legiondaries, AP, azerite, essences, AP again, an absurd amount of class design/balancing, corruption etc. It's not hindsight or confirmation bias, it's Blizzard consistently ignoring feedback that should be blindingly obvious and they don't learn from past mistakes.

When you shoot a machine gun at a side of a barn, some bullets inevitably hit.


I've been in just every Alpha for many years and it's same thing through and through - there are mountains of feedback. Much of it is pure trash/speculation. Plenty of it sounds legitimate, but fail to take into account that the game has to appeal to many different players groups, as opposed to that one specific group this feedback is relevant for. And finally some of the feedback is "duh", no argument there.

I seen them make builds with changes that went almost 1-to-1 with feedback given, whether it's class, mechanics or general changes. They also ignored some feedback that turned out to be true in the end and it will be always a thing, but that's how it is given how massive the game is.

Taking your example, quite frankly - you just throw some buzz-words with little context. I, personally, don't see what's so horrible about AP and Azerite and your token "an absurd amount of class design/balancing" is just a crapshot in the dark, because you can invoke that sentence in just about everything ever and get away with it.

Specifically on AP, Raelbo hits the nail there, some more "invested" people feel compelled to grind that to dust, where in reality most of the expansion you could get to the level you need pretty much semi-passively by just playing the game. IMO, the biggest flaw with AP comes to pure all or nothing psychology many of the more competitive players sport.

I do think that corruptions are an interesting addition that suffered from massive acquisition issues early on that really hurt peoples' perception and it is true that in between essences and corruption there is some overabundance of passive procs that in many cases cheapen your personal effort in combat.

As for Legiondaries, it's a case where they really were fine in itself and only the acquisition was fucked, same goes for Azerite in the beginning of expansion - where it was a major system of the expansion and you barely got any Azerite gear, let alone decent one out there.

[TorAndre]

Yes, it's called a vocal minority. WoW has millions of players, of which only a tiny fraction are represented here on MMO-C. You have no basis for claiming that anything said on this site is representative of the player base at large.



As if there was actually an argument to counter in the first place Present an argument, as opposed to an unsubstantiated statement, and I'll counter accordingly.



According to common sense. Since when was any tier "irrelevant" while it's current? And why on earth should it remain relevant after a new tier has dropped?



If you had a good argument you would. But that seems unlikely because while many on the forum share your opinion, I have yet to see a decent reason why, and plenty of bad arguments eg:

People will argue that putting items in the shop takes them out of the game. Completely illogical argument because it assumes that said item would have existed without the shop. Whereas to anyone good at logic, it's pretty obvious that you remove the shop and you're going to lose even more.
People also argue that it's bad because it's P2W and then spend the entire thread trying to define the shop as P2W - which is basically just a strawmanining.



TBH I don't know what people were expecting. Maybe some people were hoping for something to replace raiding, dungeons, battlegrounds and world quests. I always just saw them as something to supplement play though, not to replace existing features.



While I realise that the Master Looter decision is unpopular around here, you cannot claim that Blizzard didn't listen to feedback. The whole basis of their decision to move to PL is customer feedback - in the form of millions upon millions of GM tickets over many, many years regarding loot disputes.

These are good arguments. I am convinced by all of them since don't seem to be based eround emotion like many other arguments here.

[Whitedragon]

and those were real criticisms, vehicle combat is stil Dogshit to date and RAID-tier gear didnt belong on to a vendor cuz is you know its RAID-tier gear

Real but way overblown, Vehicle combat had a place in being sparingly used for some more epic moments, and they seemed to have learned that. I would almost say they could stand to bring it back a bit more. As for Raid Tier gear being on vendors, All I will say is it actually got me to raid whole a lot more back then.

When it came out, it was.

It was competing with TBC mind you.

At release? most expansions won't compeat with fully completed ones. Past that though WotLK did eclipse BC by the end.

[Lolites]

Not really, WoD happened several years ago, and it's still considered pretty much the worst xpac ever. Cata is even older, and you will have a hard time finding people who think it was better than WotLK or even MoP.

just "walk" a bit on this very forum and you will find people praising both wod and cata as amazing expansions...
sure, majority still consider WoD bad, but seems like the majority is getting smaller every year people have memory of a fucking goldfish when it comes to wow expansions...
for example praising wotlk wit hthe same breath as claiming 8.3 was "empty" always craks me up, as patches 8.1 and 8.3 had a lot less content

[kaminaris]

I don't need to do a calculation. Because the Artifact weapons did not compete with other items for the entire expansion. There's no simplicity or complexity behind those weapons. I agree, it would be a lot easier to calculate a pair of cloth pants vs another pair of cloth pants, but because Artifact weapons has no competition, they become the most simple piece of equipment in the entire game, because you will never have to ask "Is this item better" outside of relics. And relics only had 1 Weapon trait on them + Item Level. Whereas you have to actually calculate secondary stats, all you need to know is "Is trait X better than trait Y?" And that's it.

That absolutely does not matter if it had competition or not. Do you realize how wrong you are or still not?
Artifact weapon is like having another 20 trinket slots.

So legion added 20 trinket slots and all characters got predefined items in it, then it was taken away and only left 3 additional trinket slots, this time, customizable.
That is a tons of complexity added to characters.

I am going to repeat myself. You do not need to do Order Hall campaigns to know half the story of Legion. Order Halls are side quests meant to show you the aesthetics of the classes. They're not "Legion" stories.

You can repeat yourself all you want, those stories were still a part of legion expansion, that was a lot of story that you missed unless you had 12 alts.

Wrong. Because there's no sense of community in Boralus or Dazar'Alor. It's just like Stormwind or Orgrimmar. In the Order Hall, you have likeminded people, playing the same class as you. You can see other people's transmogs, you can compare talents and builds. There's a sense of comradery in the Order Halls you just don't find in an open city.

That is absolute bullshit and you know it
Likeminded people have nothing to do with class you play.
You find likeminded people in guilds and communities.
You can compare talents on logs.
And I've never ever made a friend with people playing same class as me while i made good couple of friends playing completely different classes.

I'll repeat myself again. They did not ruin his character. Yes they butchered their stories, and yes... If Vol'jin was not dead, Sylvanas would not be warchief, that is fact. But they did not ruin the characters themselves.

Yes they did ruin him, you counter argumented yourself lol. Butchering story of a character is essentially ruining it.

The plot of Warlords of Draenor started out strong.

I didn't even read more senteces, how can anyone with right mind think WoD story started strong? It was immediate leap of faith straight to the abyss.

You can also sum up BFA story line with next to no effort. Blue and red goes to war over random new ass-pull resource, monster research lab appears, blue and red goes to war again, great villain appears, greater villain appears, heroes unite to use a random artifact to kill it. No twists, no turns.

That is cool, still 5 more senteces than legion story.

Don't pull out single instances of classes showing up on a roster, when the actual facts and percentages shows a completely different story on a larger scale. If you want to talk about facts, do your research and stop strawmanning. This discussion ends here, I am not interested in debating this further. There are obviously specs, and in one case (Warlock) an entire class, that cannot handle it.

You absolutely do not understand what you are saying. Having more warrior tanks than other tanks only shows that it's easier with warriors. It doesn't tell that other tanks are not viable. YES THEY ARE VIABLE. Having a single tank in top rating confirms it.

And people who does 26+ shows that all you need is skill. Since vast majority of wow playerbase complains about lack of balance, yet they don't even come close to what better players can achieve.