Those that are left are on overwatch, if not already left, or with riot
Those that are left are on overwatch, if not already left, or with riot
People really disliked the higher difficulty of instances, the new zones, the story, Deathwing, the new race/class combinations. Oh and the ZG/ZA patch... Good lord people hated that!
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And the vast majority loved that. That's why Wotlk saw the biggest sub rise ever. They adapted and started catering towards the casual, and much larger, crowd instead of the small hardcore crowd.
Amazing sig, done by mighty Lokann
What ? I get the dungeon thing which got changed later. But the otger things I never heard anyond complain about. This is like you stating people didnt like woltk cause of the lich king. Maybe 1-2 people said such thing but thats not close to what the majority cares about when we look at the forums
Specially new race class combos were loved, heck I remember the forums going nuts over troll druid and human hunter is one of the most played combination. In legion there were almost as many human hunter already as there are dwarf ones ever madd
I think it's a far fetch to say 'the vast majority' when WoW itself introduced more mechanics and things for you to learn outside of baby mode leveling experiences. And back-peddled, and forward, and back... They keep going back and forth with expansions on this. Don't forget, WotLK didn't introduce the dungeon finder until later. FFXIV even proved that players will do what Ghostcrawler initially said way back then - he just didn't factor in the latter WotLK playerbase that replaced quite a few players at the time, and exploded in popularity too! (Blizzard admitted it was gaining more than it was losing).
As for the complaints: Yeah, those were absolutely there and saying otherwise is ignorant. The new zones weren't hated all that much in their entirety compared to Vashj'ir (My favorite zone in that expansion!) - the story was decently received until the troll patch (Where nothing new happened) and then the end of the entire story bulged out in one huge patch... That had an undercooked raid to boot. At least the dungeons were fun - even if way easier than release and troll dungeons.
PS: I too remember the Metzen / Thrall callouts with his story throughout Cataclysm. Easily the worst part of the expansion, even compared to Deathwing.
People really fucking hated mechanics after WotLK I noticed. Troll dungeons were NOT easy if people kept doing the wrong thing during a fight, it'd end up with you either wiping, or commonly 3 / 4 manning it for the majority of a fight. Even 2-manning depending on if a healer was left alive and a stronger DPS / Tank. Fun / Not fun times.
I definitely remember the most hated being Tauren Paladins over any other, honestly. I also didn't enjoy it, especially with little to no leadup to the reveal. (Yes, yes I know it was mentioned in WotLK in-game books, shush.) But now that they keep adding more classes to things that shouldn't have them... Hell if I care if most races can be any class.
In my opinion it all went downhill when Blizzard grew too fast from being a bunch of metalhead nerds creating games they are passionate about to a corporate machine trying to squeeze out profits no matter what.
Exploitative work practices, office politics and pressure groups within a company will simply fumigate all creative skills out of the company.
The company as a whole will end up diverting all resources to comply with all the pressure from big corporate and special interest groups and all the will be left is employees always looking behind their backs in fear of being the next scapegoat to appease the gods.
Anyone know when was it that they stopped giving a direct answer about sub numbers of WoW?
I would rather hear more talk about creating the best possible games for their paying customers than complying with all the latest buzzwords.
What is the most entertaining part of Blizzard games you ask? The absolutely cringe community
The Pink Hat Virtue Knights
Half of the clown college virtue signal like they care because it fits their loony liberal agenda in the delusion that any corporation has their interested in mind. Those rainbows after pride month don't last long kids. This group virtue signals to the grave while belittling the groups they claim to support as if the groups whom they signal for are too incompetent to take care of themselves. I am fairly certain Jamal applying for environment design team doesn't need little Ashton in moms basement Oregon reminding him that he is oppressed and needs his "hopes and prayers" to succeed in this industry.
The Simpbois
The other half of the clown college is dedicated in taking buckets of blizzard man-gravy to the face as loyal fan-boys that will stop at nothing to justify the actions of the creators. This group is literally referred to by the executives as cash-cows to be milk and will likely apply the suction devices to themselves if Lady Sylvanas tells them too. These kids will use everything in their arsenal to discredit any criticism of the game in which they simp. The simpbois will lick the bottoms of Bobbys feet (oy vey) while their wives perform fellatio and Alex Afrasiabi tapes it. There is no limit in which they can get cucked by this company and they will still defend it until they're raising Bobbies bastard children.
Absolute insanity why either side continues to play an extremely outdated daily log-in metrics simulator but god is it entertaining to watch.
Brian Birmingham is on the Classic WoW team. He started working on original Naxxramas and his first credits are on original TBC:
https://www.mobygames.com/developer/...operId,257430/
There's a lot more employees from Vanilla/TBC/WoTLK still working on WoW than people think
Jimmy Lo:
https://www.mobygames.com/developer/...operId,155805/
https://www.artstation.com/jimmylo
Roman Kenney. He also worked on the original Warcraft RTS game:
https://www.mobygames.com/developer/...eloperId,1031/
There's lots more but I'm not going to spend hours looking through credits looking for them.
Being the OG doesn't mean anything. They are just a bunch of fallible people that were given too much credit.
WoTLK was great until ToC/ICC split into 4 difficulty levels; this is when gearscore became popular and burnout started to increase drastically; furthermore, shortly after the release of Ruby Sanctum; Blizzard butchered talent builds by locking characters to 1 talent tree and followed it by dismissing the community citing illusion of choice, rose tinted glasses, etc.. I.E. pissing off their customers who liked RPGs, the real RPGs where your character has strengths and weaknesses.
I personally am a big proponent of split difficulties. It's silly to think that you could cater to all tastes in a simple system like normal + heroic, or gods forbid even the old single difficulty system. I do appreciate it comes with downsides, but that's a price I personally at least am willing to pay for an overall better experience. That's not to say there aren't kinks to iron out - some tweaks to the loot system would be nice.
As for the talents, it really is a bit of a tricky spot. On the one hand I 100% agree that better character progression and customization is sorely needed; on the other hand there are the pitfalls of overly deep or complex systems, that might turn people off and lead precisely to the kind of "illusion of choice" situation we used to have; though we certainly have our fair share of that still, in a different way.
I'd like them to just revamp the way character progression works in general. No more borrowed power systems to mimic things, just give it to characters straight.
played wc2 when i was a kid and every game since, got realm first illidan and algalon and madness (work fucked my hardcore raiding schedule after mogu'shan but still raid casually every chance i get), still playing WoW retail now and enjoying it
edit: lol misunderstood this thread, thought you were asking about players. New blood is good; even without the recent news, people need to be cycled out. Its not like presidents and CEOs do much anyway.
I don't know.... For split difficulties I get it, you do have the option to limiting yourself to just one; sometimes outside pressures make that choice unpleasant. When I look to an old raid like Ulduar for example, I do think the hardmord bosses were a bit excessive in design, however, I do like there being a challenging optional boss. Algalon was great, a hard encounter for guilds that wanted to push their limits. I feel like raids should have 1 difficulty with a range of difficulty on the encounters; optional "overtuned" bosses if you so choose. I personally had more drive to do those hard encounters when presented in such a way, as opposed to doing everything on LFR, then more of the same on normal raid, more of the same on mythic. Having an open range for the raids lets different skill level players team up, instead of creating this divide of who wants to do what level. The difficulty split broke up my core raid group, you choose what your end-game is. If you're going min-max, the obvious choice is to go for the +2 sword instead of the +1.