Has player feedback ever made the game worse?

[Relapses]

Listening to this community has historically not been a great thing. They need to stop trying to please everyone and just stick to their vision of what the game is supposed to be.

There's a fair amount of changes that Blizzard has made which were not a result of community outcry. Even some of the changes you mentioned were not direct responses to the community as you conveniently framed them. This community is toxic AF and generally should not be listened to but that also doesn't mean that Blizzard should live in an insulated shell and only ever do what they feel is best.

[Deferionus]

I unironically raidlead server first ToT 10man with the 'B' team while the 'A' team was trying to down EM. Listening to the RL pretend to be happy for us was one of the greatest moments in wow for me.

That said ToT wasn't close to an issue at all on 10 man. As you correctly pointed out BoT was the real broken raid, it was pretty funny seeing the forum meltdowns of the guilds that went 10 man to 'trim the fat' getting fucking hammered in the dick because halfus opened on an 'impossible' drake week.


Literally every single complaint I've ever heard about cata beyond 'muh vanilla wurld' was directly tied to dragon soul. I will always stand by the position that cata wasn't a bad expo, DS was a terrible patch.

Your position isn't wrong. Class design was great. I think Cata was the pinnacle for my affliction warlock. Arenas were much better balanced than WOTLK and BC. Rated Battlegrounds were a great addition at the time. Heroics were actually heroic again. You had three raids on launch (four if you include Tol Barad) and the bosses weren't push overs. Outdoor PvP was a thing in the daily quest hub and I can't recall any time besides the BC hub from 2.4 where it was as vibrant. Firelands was a good raid also.

I rank WOTLK and Legion as the top two WoW expacs and put Cata just a bit behind them.

On the topic of feedback making the game worse the feedback from Legion on legendaries and artifact weapons made the game worse and BfA shows it.

[Mirishka]

That would first require them to make some sort of meaningful change based on player feedback, which from what I can recall anyways, has never happened.

A shame that posting here doesn't first require a person to know what they're talking about.

[Unholyground]

Has there ever been times where the devs have listened to player feedback that then made the game worse or had players asking for a revert?

Not really a ton of that, most of the garbage was them trying half-assed ideas and then trying to fix their own mistakes these ideas created with other worse ideas or band-aids which lasted for expansions.

[Soon-TM]

Pretty much every RPG aspect being removed was because of players complaining about having to carry ammo, or reagents. Attunements as well with having to get it for every new raid member to join the raid. Resistance gear cause people didnt want to have to carry multiple sets of gear.

All those RPG aspects, lovely as they were, prevented people from playing together, which in the end is all a MMO is about. They work fine in single player, or otherwise non-competitive games, though.

[Powerogue]

"Pandas are stupid, we want an edgy expansion!"
"Player owned housing is a great idea!"

[Seranthor]

Has there ever been times where the devs have listened to player feedback that then made the game worse or had players asking for a revert?

sure... every time they change something someone comes along and flips their shit over it. Or if Blizzard doesn't change it then folks squeal that Blizzard is listening to the wrong people.

[Tesshin83]

Yes almost everything.

LFR was a result of people complaining not having time to raid.

4 different types if difficulty was because people didn't get invited to raid groups.

30 itemlevel increase from each patch which invalidates even mythic gear from previous tier was because people complained they had no gear after taking 1 year break from the game.

Every specc being almost the same with different icons and animations is a result of whining about class balance.

Titan forged was result of people complaining its boring to raid 3 months into the patch.

Warfronts was a result of people claiming they have only 2 hours of time to play each week and they still want items.

The list goes on and on.

I cant even think of anything good that comes from player feedback.

Game was better when they made the game they wanted to make. Its a reason why they are the developers and not us.

[ro9ue]

Cataclysm heroics were a response to high-end players in Wrath saying that the dungeons were too easy. I think a lot of the stuff they do over the long run of a couple of expansions is driven to some extent by player feedback. Whether or not you think it makes the game better or worse is up to you.

Anyone that thinks they've never made a change based on what they hear from players is simply wrong. They do all the time but it tends to be over the longer term. It's not difficult to find developer chats and Q&A's where they talk about stuff they've done based on player feedback.

Personally, they are game designers, we mostly are not, so much of what players request ends up being terrible for the game in my opinion.

And even then, making the game "worse" is subjective. Personally I liked Cataclysm dungeons a lot. Something was lost from WoW when we stopped having to use CC imo. Magister's Terrace or BRD were two of my favorite dungeons where a rogue had to sap stuff, you had to call out and mark sheeps, interrupt heals... and if you didn't have specific classes you had to get creative - frost nova'ing mobs and fearing them...

Right now I'm not sure what the game is in the dungeon world outside of doing your best AOE rotation? Again that's where "worse" is subjective. Some people probably like the gogogo mentality and blowing shit up, but for me I come from earlier RPGs where you're using the breadth of your toolkit to solve a problem.

The only other thing I'd point out is it doesn't matter if the player feedback is X or Y, it's the responsibility of the devs to go over that feedback, interpret it, and apply it using their knowledge.

[Soon-TM]

Its a reason why they are the developers and not us.

Going by your statement, we should conclude that e.g. Ion should have never been listened to, much less hired. After all, he started as a player, and nothing good can ever come out of player feedback, according to you. Careful with those appeals to authority

[Djaye]

Beginning of Cataclysm: "Raid numbers are down"
Middle of Cataclysm: "Raid numbers are still coming down, especially as we've had cuts to the raid creation team. Only seven bosses and we still can't get people to raid!"
Community: "Well, open up raids the same way you opened up dungeons in 3.3 with the Dungeon Finder"
*LFR created*

*ends up being universally an excellent fix*

LFR is a cancer. should be a slide show and not the afk shitshow it is and has always been.
catering to casuals is what started the demise of retail and is what continues to ruin it. that being said, the self proclaimed hardcore players are what killed the communities along with CRZ's.

[Relapses]

LFR is a cancer. should be a slide show and not the afk shitshow it is and has always been.
catering to casuals is what started the demise of retail and is what continues to ruin it. that being said, the self proclaimed hardcore players are what killed the communities along with CRZ's.

This is demonstrably false. You have no way of knowing why anybody quit and it's a foregone conclusion to say that "catering to casuals" had literally fuck all to do with the reasons people stopped playing.

[ONCHEhap]

a lot of what people consider to be terrible about modern WoW are pretty much directly what the same people have been asking for.

The whole constant grind for power for example,people asked for it for years.

Now that it's there,most people hate it

[WintersLegion]

Cataclysm heroics were a response to high-end players in Wrath saying that the dungeons were too easy. I think a lot of the stuff they do over the long run of a couple of expansions is driven to some extent by player feedback. Whether or not you think it makes the game better or worse is up to you.

Anyone that thinks they've never made a change based on what they hear from players is simply wrong. They do all the time but it tends to be over the longer term. It's not difficult to find developer chats and Q&A's where they talk about stuff they've done based on player feedback.

Personally, they are game designers, we mostly are not, so much of what players request ends up being terrible for the game in my opinion.

Yep one of the issues with WoD was the reps were meaningless since they only gave mounts, and pets which happened because people complained in MoP about things being locked behind reps that they needed but then complained in WoD that there was no point in doing reps because there was nothing they needed from them.

[Belloc]

Literally every single complaint I've ever heard about cata beyond 'muh vanilla wurld' was directly tied to dragon soul. I will always stand by the position that cata wasn't a bad expo, DS was a terrible patch.

I actually quite liked Dragon Soul. I understand that people were upset with the reused assets (which is a silly complaint, in my opinion), but the fights themselves were pretty great:

First boss was simple, but a nice change from the normal mode version. The next two bosses were interesting and challenging. Fourth boss was a lot of movement but also pretty interesting and challenging. Fifth boss was an exercise in arranging/cycling through defensive cooldowns. Sixth boss was... well, I didn't like the sixth boss all that much, but it wasn't terrible. Spine of Deathwing was probably my least favorite fight just because of how uninteresting it was mechanically (boring + DPS check does not make for a very enjoyable fight). Last fight was also pretty solid, if a little too easy.

If it weren't for the reused assets and the year-long+ final raid, Dragon Soul would probably have been remembered fondly.

Of course, it also introduced LFR which, at the time, was pretty exciting. We all know how the MMO-Champion community feels about it now, though.

[munkeyinorbit]

Better question is how many times did Blizzard listen to the feedback and do a very good job fixing the problem.
'

All of bfa.
Turned azerite gear into targeted hear.
Added h warfronts
Got rid of TF
Made the game easier for alts.

These are just the big ones. This has got to be the most casual pandered expansion that there has ever been.

[Velerios]

Yep!

Back in MoP people complained about dailies, so in WoD we had no dailies, just one "fill the bar" of our choice each day. Very little variety, much of the world was unused and there was little to do outside your Garrison.

People complained about that and we got world quests, which were fine. But now it sounds like we're losing those in favour of dailies, again, which are just inferior to world quests so

The pendulum swings.

The first half is totally right, the second half is totally wrong. World quests are inferior to dailys always, period. MoP had dailies, and many of them; BUT THE ISSUE WAS NEVER THAT IT WAS TOO MUCH. The issue was that Blizzard in ther wisdom tied Valor Point Gear to the reputation of the daily-quest-vendors. Not only it required reverted on these factions to unlock valor gear at the beginning, nope, you also needed high reputation (not sure if honored or reverted) to unlock a third reputation. This is the insanity in this story. That made people get mad about it, but not because of the dailies: if these valor gear vendors were simply vendors who sold valor gear without any CRAPPY reputation attached to it, then MoP had 0 issues with dailies, no matter how many there were.

But nope, blizzard wanted to go the timegated way to milk out the money on the expansion. Didn't worked well and didn't work now.

But then we got crapexis dailies that were horrible, and after this we got world quests that were horrible too. Dailies are better than this, because dailies can lead people back to a central hub, and that's as important as having a lot to do. So nope, world quests are crap compared to dailies. Having a central hub to hang out, getting all the quests, and then turning in all the rewards at once feel more rewarding than ding here, this there, this here, and so on. A central hub allows people to gather, do simply stupid stuff and get together. We right now have this only for the emissaries and invastions, and at least this helps a bit to gather.

There is a reason why suramar was the best of all legion zones and that the others were crap: because it had a very major central hub. And having more reasons to hang out at the hub is always better.

I don't say world quests should disappear, but only as optional objectives to dailies.

[munkeyinorbit]

LOL. Did Azerite talents suddenly become gameplay changing and interesting beyond "RANDOM PROC FOR X MASTERY" in 8.2 did they?

Oh wait. No they didn't. Also - the same Azerite traits that were broken in 8.0 remained broken until 8.3. Literally bare minimum balance to add any sort of variety.

Did Azerite traits swap on swapping specs? No? Oh okay.

Did the respec cost get reduced? No? Oh okay.



Azerite is such a failed concept and system that Blizzard attempted to give you your BEST Azerite traits on all the raid gear in Nyalotha. So you no longer had to try and get them. If that isn't giving up, then what is? They literally had a blog post stating this. They failed though because apparently they don't even know what the best one are in their own game.

Whether they failed or not is not the argument. They listened to players and that is the argument. Just because they didn't implement your changes didn't mean they didn't listen. They listened to the players and implemented what they could. Staying angry about it after all this time doesn't seem healthy.

[Relapses]

Whether they failed or not is not the argument. They listened to players and that is the argument. Just because they didn't implement your changes didn't mean they didn't listen. They listened to the players and implemented what they could. Staying angry about it after all this time doesn't seem healthy.

I don't know if I'd call Azerite gear "listening to feedback." It seems like it was a compromise between the two loudest praises and criticisms of Legion. The praise being, "We love Artifact weapons!" and the criticism, "but the early RNG of Legiondaries was shit." I think the developers envisioned Azerite gear playing out much differently than it did once it was in the hands of players and everything that happened over the course of BfA was Blizzard trying to perfect an inherently flawed concept.

[rrayy]

Has there ever been times where the devs have listened to player feedback that then made the game worse or had players asking for a revert?

It wasn't players asking for a revert, but Blizzard reverting themselves and that is leveling. ASt the end of Legion, players were complaining that leveling was going way too fast, so Blizzard nerfed the hell out of it and heirlooms. Jump forward to the reveal of Shadownlands and now Blizzard says leveling is too daunting and slow so tehy decide on a level squish. Maybe if they hadn't nerfed the hell out of it to begin with it wouldn't have seemed so daunting to the point of a level squish,

- - - Updated - - -

The first half is totally right, the second half is totally wrong. World quests are inferior to dailys always, period. MoP had dailies, and many of them; BUT THE ISSUE WAS NEVER THAT IT WAS TOO MUCH. The issue was that Blizzard in ther wisdom tied Valor Point Gear to the reputation of the daily-quest-vendors. Not only it required reverted on these factions to unlock valor gear at the beginning, nope, you also needed high reputation (not sure if honored or reverted) to unlock a third reputation. This is the insanity in this story. That made people get mad about it, but not because of the dailies: if these valor gear vendors were simply vendors who sold valor gear without any CRAPPY reputation attached to it, then MoP had 0 issues with dailies, no matter how many there were.

But nope, blizzard wanted to go the timegated way to milk out the money on the expansion. Didn't worked well and didn't work now.

But then we got crapexis dailies that were horrible, and after this we got world quests that were horrible too. Dailies are better than this, because dailies can lead people back to a central hub, and that's as important as having a lot to do. So nope, world quests are crap compared to dailies. Having a central hub to hang out, getting all the quests, and then turning in all the rewards at once feel more rewarding than ding here, this there, this here, and so on. A central hub allows people to gather, do simply stupid stuff and get together. We right now have this only for the emissaries and invastions, and at least this helps a bit to gather.

There is a reason why suramar was the best of all legion zones and that the others were crap: because it had a very major central hub. And having more reasons to hang out at the hub is always better.

I don't say world quests should disappear, but only as optional objectives to dailies.

I disagree completely with all of this. Dailies were beyond terrible because it was the same dam 3-4 quests every single day and their was no choice. With World quests, you can do different ones every day and it does not feel like a repetitive grind.

World Quests are far superior to dailies in every single way. That is also why Suramar sucked. Variety is always better than "sitting at the same central" hub doing the same quests every single day.