Preach Interview with Ion Hazzikostas

[Tesshin83]

Are you not listening? If you forget about numbers, this is not a problem, because the issue is, that pick X because it is the best, and after I have unlocked everything the ban hammer hits and I want to swap. Another example would be just wanting to try a new ability, but guess what, you have to unlock everything from scratch again.

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Yes the change will be easy, but you have to unlock everything again. And what if you dont like your new ability? All people are asking for is having choices about visuals and dps be separate.

How about you just pick what you like and just play the game for what it is?

I don't understand this need to have everything in the game at your disposal all the time.

If you are curious about a covenant even more, then pick that covenant on an alt.

[Asheeva]

No, people like you who keep to these bad faith arguments based on a purposeful distortion of facts and statements are the problem.

He is right tho. This only affects the top 1%, the problem is everybody who managed to clear a mythic raid in 6 months after dozens of nerfs is considering himself a top-level player.

[Tesshin83]

No, people like you who keep to these bad faith arguments based on a purposeful distortion of facts and statements are the problem.

What facts am I distorting?

"People like me" go out of our way to explain to confused people on these forums the bigger picture and stop people from parroting stupid arguments on issues they havent even thought out clearly.

[Malikath]

He is right tho.

Lol, he's not, and no matter of willful ignorance will obscure that, the entire community follows these decisions as a course of organic competitive play, with the alternative being a minority so small as to be insignificant.
If Ion wishes to ignore it or fight it will mean the loss of his employment, either he's fired or the company goes bust as the few remaining games they're profitable in go to shit and they can like so many others succumb to the punishment of the market.

[Nagawithlegs]

I really just want to know what ass you guys pull the 1% meme out of.

Not memeing. I am saying that 99% will follow what Icy Veins/Wowhead/Bloodmallet says is BIS and 1% will make a choice not to, or not care. I would like anyone to argue otherwise.

[Frolk]

So how long its gonna take to realise Covenant is shit and it will be nerf to the ground ?

9.1, and for 9.3.5 we can pick and choose abilities without them being locked to their Covenant and they will say "We have learned"

[Nnyco]

Preach has such a disorted view of the game, im suprised anyone takes him seriously.

[Vakir]

Show me basis for this percentage. Assuming you're not just a liar, I expect solid proof. Go ahead. How did you arrive at 1%? How many people did you interview out of how many who play WoW? You're not a liar, are you?

This is attempting to prove a negative, which you cannot do. The assertion is that "this only affects the top 1%." That is what is being presented by the opposition. There's no real way to properly give any comprehensive data breakdown of a game as large, international, and varied in interests and game philosophy as WoW from some rando layman.

That being said:

Ignoring that Ion himself states this is a falsehood, you need only look at traffic for sites like Icy Veins or Bloodmallet.

https://www.similarweb.com/website/b....com/#overview
similarweb.com/website/icy-veins.com/

For Bloodmallet, you're looking at a range around 1 million per month. Not terribly high, but it's also a less popular simming site. It has dropped recently, but this is in light of the fact that this is a down period for the expansion.

If you go to Icy Veins, you have a bigger picture, with monthly views closer to 9-14 million.

For both sites, it's worth noting the bounce rate of about 50%. Bounce rate refers to someone accessing the site and only reading one page. This means most visitors coming to Icy Veins or Bloodmallet are checking a stat or two and leaving. This means we can't account something like the gaming news or forums for Icy Veins to be a huge factor. Icy Veins also covers stuff like meta pages for Diablo 3 and Heroes of the Storm, so it's not 100% WoW based.

That being said, it paints a picture of a pretty broad range of access, especially for one being in the 100s for gaming site popularity on an MMO that's almost voting age.

This ain't a 1-2% issue. I dunno what percent it is, but people who make the argument for allowing ability flexibility aren't beholden to producing a statistic for people who want to be obtuse about it.

[Tesshin83]

Shadowlands gonna suck.


They still don't understand what's ruining the game.

Whats ruining the game is that people look so much up to their hero on twitch who knows that spreading their hatred for the game they make money and they take this as gospel without even having made their own informed opinions.

Then they go into the game and pretend that if they min max everything as possible, they make up for their lack of strategic and tactical understanding of the game.

Its easier to just do the assumed meta choice then to actually figure out stuff on your own.

You can do a +15 or clear mythic raid with any specc, any talent setup, any azerite piece and any corruption if you strategic and tactical knowledge of the game is high enough. Its only when this achieved at top world level that having the min maxed setup will make or break your ability to get further.

Some people just want to get as much items as possible with as low effort as possible.

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Not memeing. I am saying that 99% will follow what Icy Veins/Wowhead/Bloodmallet says is BIS and 1% will make a choice not to, or not care. I would like anyone to argue otherwise.

Sure. About half the playerbase doesn't even know what bloodmallet or icy veins is.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Shit, preach's idea (having to do quests to earn the other covenants abilities) is pretty good. I dig that, it should be a hard quest though.

You are right. It is a great idea. But simply because you put Preach and good idea in the same train of thought a 3rd of this forum is raging against you. People on the camera can never be right.

At least until a patch or two into the expansion when they are rage quitting or at the very least bitching about this themselves.. then well.. what was Blizzard thinking and why was there no feedback.. blah blah

[Aphrel]

Oh boys my covenant ability did 4.8% of my total damage and my friend's covenant ability did 5.0%. GG UNSUB STUPID GAME.

Please stop.

Ions example of a 0.1% dps increase betwen talents is a bold claim given the disparity in power between the last 3 systems they added to the game in this expansion.

Azerite pieces has a difference of 5-10% between the best and worst pieces (and this is assuming we always pick the strongest options, if we compare the 0dps chocies vs the top ones we get an even bigger disparity).

The essences can make up for over 10% in some specific cases on the major choice alone, and even more if we go alout and comapre the 4 top choices vs 4 useless choices.

The corruptions are the biggest offender of all. Theres logs where infinite stars does 35% of a players damage (thats over a 50% dmg increase compared to an identical player without it).

And now ion makes in indirect claim that the disaprity will be in the 10ths of a %... given their 15 year trackrecord of tuning specs id say they are not even close to capabable of delivering such a tuning.

Now immagine if at the start of bfa, we had to go in blind and pick azerite traits, essences and corruptions. With no way to ever change them at a later point... That would have been an even bigger disaster than what we alredy had.

[Tesshin83]

Lol, he's not, and no matter of willful ignorance will obscure that, the entire community follows these decisions as a course of organic competitive play, with the alternative being a minority so small as to be insignificant.
If Ion wishes to ignore it or fight it will mean the loss of his employment, either he's fired or the company goes bust as the few remaining games they're profitable in go to shit and they can like so many others succumb to the punishment of the market.

Your assumption that the "entire community follows these decisions as a course of organtic competitive play" is a wild fantasy with no evidence.

Far above half the playerbase will just go with whatever appeals to them and dont care about the competitive aspect of the game at all.

Do you even spend any amount of time inside the game?

[Asheeva]

Not memeing. I am saying that 99% will follow what Icy Veins/Wowhead/Bloodmallet says is BIS and 1% will make a choice not to, or not care. I would like anyone to argue otherwise.

I won't even go into details about how delusional is to think that 99% of the community is a min-maxer (or at least reads guides, it's way less, just think about how many players you see every day with terrible talent / essence / gear choices).
Let's ignore this part, you still assume there will be a clearcut best choice which is impossible with the current covenant powers even if they won't get the balance right (I am not stupid, no way they will get it right, that's a fact). Still, there are pure single target abilities, aoe abilities, abilities with utility, pvp focused abilities, or general all-rounder abilities. You can't just say X will be the best choice everywhere, it will be like X is best on single target fights, Y is the best in mythic+ and aoe heavy fights, if it's a movement heavy fight Z is the best, etc. And this is fine by me.

[Snorlaxi]

This is attempting to prove a negative, which you cannot do.

Proving that something is a 1% is not proving a negative. It's a statistic. If it's 1% (according to some here) then it can be proven. Otherwise it's not 1%. You're right on what you say next: there is no feasible way for any of us to prove this. That is precisely why anyone who is respectable - and is therefore not fine with using fantasy as base for their arguments - does not use it. Even something as far open as "few people" instead of 1% is still not something you can know for a fact and therefore it's not solid.

What passes for argument here is people creating facts and when someone asks them to back those up they mostly ignore in fear and hope that people won't notice. It's very infantile. Not much better than "my dad works at sony" level of argumentation. It's fantasy. I'd expect people to be above that.

[OrcsRLame]

Your assumption that the "entire community follows these decisions as a course of organtic competitive play" is a wild fantasy with no evidence.

Far above half the playerbase will just go with whatever appeals to them and dont care about the competitive aspect of the game at all.

Do you even spend any amount of time inside the game?

Personally, I've been in casual social guilds and I've been in mythic raid guilds. Most people that I've met in wow have cared about minmaxing to one extent or another. In my experience, Icy Veins was used by a lot of the casuals I've met over the years. They use it as a sort of quick guide to playing an alt because they don't want to think too hard about how to build their character. So they just look up their BiS traits/talents/stats, plug it all into their character and forget about it. In mythic raid guilds on the other hand, usually when someone rolled an alt they would ask someone in guild that mained that class how to build it instead of going to Icy Veins or some other site.

[Cthulhu fhtagn]

I do agree that it wouldnt be great to have just another talent row for these new abilities, ending up again to the situation where there is always a right choise for a single raid boss and everyone having exact same skills in each one of them. The idea of having different abilities on same class players is somewhat neat if they are even remotely balanced.

However i don't quite understand why they are tied to the covenants. Covenants now have soulbinds, covenant abilities and story all bound to the same thing and for sure people would like to mix and match those. Like if i want the sparky spell but the bitey story i do not have that option now. Feels like too much is put into a single choice without really knowing what you get from that choice.

[Tesshin83]

About the 1% thing. Its silly to imply that one means that literally. If its 1% or 10% doesn't really matter as the argument is still the same.

If we are very generous by defining upper elite you can take all the guilds that have killed 1 boss on mythic so far anf you multiply that by 20. It should give you a rough estimation on how many people who have killed at least 1 boss on mythic.

And then if you are extremely pesimistic you assume that 2 million people have been subscribed at once in. 8.3, you will find that the amount of people that stepped into mythic raiding is a very small portion of active subscribers.

The same goes for completing +20 keys.

Now if you assume that people who do normal and heroic dungeons and raids or just farm pets or do bgs have to mim max their covenants and soul binds you are delusional beyound recovery.

[Vakir]

Proving that something is a 1% is not proving a negative. It's a statistic. If it's 1% (according to some here) then it can be proven. Otherwise it's not 1%. You're right on what you say next: there is no feasible way for any of us to prove this. That is precisely why anyone who is respectable - and is therefore not fine with using fantasy as base for their arguments - does not use it. Even something as far open as "few people" instead of 1% is still not something you can know for a fact and therefore it's not solid.

What passes for argument here is people creating facts and when someone asks them to back those up they mostly ignore in fear and hope that people won't notice. It's very infantile. Not much better than "my dad works at sony" level of argumentation. It's fantasy. I'd expect people to be above that.

OK, but the people throwing out stats are generally the ones saying "it only affects 1%."

The guy you were responding to was merely saying "it's not 1%" and we can at least be sure of that - since the damn game director co-signed it, and 1% of the player pop isn't going to account for 9-14 million views with half of those being quick checks for optimization guides. It's just not feasible.

That's why I'm irritated with the idea of trying to gotcha someone with "haha but can you prove it's not 1%?!" Like, no shit, this affects more people than the ones opposing it say it does. They're not saying it in good faith, they're saying it to be condescending and dismissive. That's why people are trying to correct that bunk-ass rhetoric.

Now if you assume that people who do normal and heroic dungeons and raids or just farm pets or do bgs have to mim max their covenants and soul binds you are delusional beyound recovery.

That's not even the argument, though. There's several.

The first is that people feel pressured due to being declined when moving into higher content - not elite mythic raiding, things even like PUGs.

The second argument is "people still enjoy optimizing characters even if they don't have to." People shouldn't be penalized story-wise and aesthetic-wise for going with what performs well.

And third is just general flexibility. Certain specs and activities work better with certain abilities, and they will no matter how they're tuned. Specs and talents are changeable for that reason. So for Covenant abilities, does that mean you're inherently enjoying an activity less because you don't have the Covenant most suited for it?

Ultimately, the people doing normals and pet battles won't be affected by allowing this change. It's very easy to call people delusional...when you're oversimplifying their position.

[oplawlz]

I do agree that it wouldnt be great to have just another talent row for these new abilities, ending up again to the situation where there is always a right choise for a single raid boss and everyone having exact same skills in each one of them. The idea of having different abilities on same class players is somewhat neat if they are even remotely balanced.

However i don't quite understand why they are tied to the covenants. Covenants now have soulbinds, covenant abilities and story all bound to the same thing and for sure people would like to mix and match those. Like if i want the sparky spell but the bitey story i do not have that option now. Feels like too much is put into a single choice without really knowing what you get from that choice.

You have the option to play the story with a different character. That's nothing new or different. The only thing that's relevantly different is the player power tied to covenants.

[Tesshin83]

Personally, I've been in casual social guilds and I've been in mythic raid guilds. Most people that I've met in wow have cared about minmaxing to one extent or another. In my experience, Icy Veins was used by a lot of the casuals I've met over the years. They use it as a sort of quick guide to playing an alt because they don't want to think too hard about how to build their character. So they just look up their BiS traits/talents/stats, plug it all into their character and forget about it. In mythic raid guilds on the other hand, usually when someone rolled an alt they would ask someone in guild that mained that class how to build it instead of going to Icy Veins or some other site.

That is true. But I would argue that reading icy veins isnt the same as min maxing. There is a spectrum of not caring about anything and simming. And I have no problems to assume that vast majority falls right on the middle. I am considering min max to sim your character, class stack in raids, have multiple alts to funnel gear etc.