What exactly does blizzard learn from each expansion?

[Hotmail]

You think you learn, but you don't.

[Luxeley]

As more and more players exit the game, Blizzard's learning and listening ability will improve. Wow is and always has been based on a time-synch business model. The combo of f2p MMOs and the intro of Moba and Battle Royal (ready out of the box gameplay), the time synch business model really started showing it's blemishes and continues to do so more and more. Make no mistake Blizzard creates and produces WOW "solely" for the purpose of milking every nickel out of players. Yes, on some level, a fun and challenging game means greater engagement, but Blizzard is a lot more concerned with the quick $$$.

[jellmoo]

BFA
- Failed experiments: island expeditions and warfronts

You raised some grest points, but I wanted to touch on this one specifically. I'm curious as to whether or not these were actually a failed experiment. They kinda felt like things that weren't actually all that bad, Blizzard just did a horrible job at incentivizing people to actually do them. The rewards never really matched the amount of time they took, and they never really did a good job updating the rewards as the expansion went on.

I always kind of felt that they were onto something with these pieces of content, but they just kind of missed the landing. I wonder if this is the sort of thing they could go back to and do better, since it feels like a bit of a shame that they were just dropped altogether.

[Itori]

They learn how to make bs systems more bs to keep us playing for max amount of time.

If anyones followed the system it started out similar to ff, you get a raid group, you go kill raid, get gear come back next week, when youre geared up start an alt and enjoy a different playstyle. No constraints to keep you playing 16hrs a day regardless. To OMG if i dont grind this tower for a week straight and do mythic+ im going to get passed by the work from home guildy that joined last week.

[unbound]

Has anyone noticed that it doesn't seem to ever come from player feed back?

Just to pick out a few from legion onwards (I could go back further but just for a bit of brevity) .

Legion: players loved artifact weapon appearances but disliked artifact power. Blizzard trashed the cosmetic parts of the system and kept artifact power going forward.

BFA: Players despised all the power systems that increasing got more and more obnoxious as the expansion continued onwards. In shadowlands these systems didn't just survive they multiplied.

I don't even see any self awareness in shadowlands since in 9.1 they added a massive time gate tied to grinding via gem sets they effectively lock you out of higher level raiding till you have them. I have to admit it is starting to feel more like spite then simple ignorance of what their playerbase wants.

Blizzard learns from each expansion how little effort they can put into an expansion results in only so much subscriber loss (and, yes, if you buy tokens, you are a subscriber...it just means that your subscription was paid for by a whale at $20/mo instead of $15/mo).

That's why they are settling in on things like 8 to 9 dungeons / expansion as well as 3 to 4 raids / expansion. If they go much cheaper, they lose too many subscribers.

Similarly, they've found that they can just use AP over and over and over again, and, as long as they generate enough PR hype that this version of AP is somehow different, it fools enough people to buy the expansion.

[Thelxi]

How to make even more money. Or how to slow the bleeding, depending on how you look at things.

[dewd]

learning implies not doing the same dumb shit again after negative reception but doing it over and over but worse each time indicates no learning is taking place

[Syegfryed]

probably how they can milk the playerbase doing the minimum possible

[vincink]

That the community is full of cynical, ridiculing know-it-alls who would obviously make a better game if they were in charge.

[Deneios]

That the community is full of cynical, ridiculing know-it-alls who would obviously make a better game if they were in charge.

And that there are enough white knights to fill their coffers.

[Fabinas]

Whenever they say they have learned something, that it's mostly Ion's PR-talk

[Chilela]

Cynicism aside, new features can be split into roughly two categories: Innovations and iterations. The former are features more or less drawn out of thin air, with minimal precedent within the scope of WoW, whereas iterations are new variations on pre-existing features. Innovations exist out of sheer necessity, in order to keep the game "fresh". Things like Challenge Modes, Island Expeditions, and Warfronts all fall into this category.

As for iterations, I'd wager the player feedback that players can see (e.g. forum posts) is just part of the equation. There are developer-side factors that are to be considered such as player engagement, both initial and longer-term, in both terms of proportion of players engaging and duration of engagement. Take for example Challenge Modes vs Mythic+. CMs, the innovation, had little reason to run them. Outside of the very start of WoD, the rewards offered were basically one-and-dones for the most part. Once you got your all-gold runs, you were basically done, unless you were trying to chase realm-best times. As such, it's fair to say that with both MoP and WoD, they became dead features for most of both xpacs, outside of the start and towards the end when rewards were going away. Once Legion and M+ rolled around, the state of rewards significantly shifted. They became part of gearing for players of all but the most casual levels, and thus were more consistently run throughout the expansion's duration. Obviously there were smaller tweaks that occurred between then and now, but the main gist is that they overhauled a pre-existing system to make it last longer, and they succeeded on that front.

As for another iteration, Torghast is more or less an iteration of Island Expeditions + Horrific Visions. They iterated upon the "randomized" aspect of IEs and made it well, more random, and eventually threw in HV-type perks, adding a layer of progression. However, the reward system would be its downfall, being the primary way of requiring legendary-crafting currency, and not rewarding much else, making it eventually turn into more of another chore to knock off the list, rather than something worth running on its own for any meaningful amount of time. 9.1.5 is at least loosening the timegating on it, allowing for farming of Legendary-crafting reagents outside of the current stringent weekly system, but the fundamental issue of rewards is still unfixed. So while they did fix some issues IEs had, they created more problems that weren't even really there previously.

[Morssoe]

Has anyone noticed that it doesn't seem to ever come from player feed back?

Just to pick out a few from legion onwards (I could go back further but just for a bit of brevity) .

Legion: players loved artifact weapon appearances but disliked artifact power. Blizzard trashed the cosmetic parts of the system and kept artifact power going forward.

BFA: Players despised all the power systems that increasing got more and more obnoxious as the expansion continued onwards. In shadowlands these systems didn't just survive they multiplied.

I don't even see any self awareness in shadowlands since in 9.1 they added a massive time gate tied to grinding via gem sets they effectively lock you out of higher level raiding till you have them. I have to admit it is starting to feel more like spite then simple ignorance of what their playerbase wants.

Each expansion Blizz learn what players want so they try their best to do the opposite.

[Schizoide]

'm curious as to whether or not these were actually a failed experiment. They kinda felt like things that weren't actually all that bad, Blizzard just did a horrible job at incentivizing people to actually do them. The rewards never really matched the amount of time they took, and they never really did a good job updating the rewards as the expansion went on.

Islands were the best way to get azerite in the beginning of the expansion, when that really mattered. Warfronts were never incentivized well. Both of them rewarded tons of cosmetics though.

IMO, the real problem was they weren't fun. Blizzard has tremendous difficulty creating new endgame activities. In fact, they've only really succeeded once-- Mythic+.

[klaps_05]

You got it a bit wrong.

Legion
What happened: Artifact power grinds are a system we can have separately in each expansion, allowing us to reinvent the same power gains over different grinds.
Lesson: If you allow players to no-life grind, they will do it, therefore set timegates.

BFA
What happened: Power gains were soft timegated (islands/azerite gear/neck/etc) to stop no-lifing.
Lesson: Even if soft timegated, players will still no-life it and sell their mothers for residuum.

Shadowlands
What happened: HARD timegate everything so we can fully control how powerful people are each week.

[username993720]

They learned that money talks
How do you keep players occupied? chores.

[Schizoide]

Artifact power grinds are a system we can have separately in each expansion, allowing us to reinvent the same power gains over different grinds.

What I find really funny is it's "AP" for three expansions in a row. Artifact Power, Azerite Power, Anima Power.

Anima is a huge improvement in that it's all cosmetic stuff, but it still sucks.

The lesson isn't that the next expansion shouldn't have an "AP", it's that it shouldn't take a long time to grind out everything in 10.0. And then you add more stuff in 10.1 and 10.2, release those patches in a reasonably short time, and make that stuff reasonably quick to get too. That's how you implement a player-friendly system. No infinite grinding progression, a stroll up a slight hill.

[Thetruth1400]

They don't. Players have told them what they've wanted for expansion after expansion, they don't listen, players quit, they eventually change things to what the players want, the players come back.

It's a rinse and repeat cycle at this point, which tells me the only thing they learned is they can beat the addicted players with a stick for quite a while, but as long as they give them a crumb at the end they bend over and take it willingly.

[Triceron]

Parasitic design doesn't really require learning from the expansion. They basically reset and implement new designs for each expansion, and just take what was most popular/worked best from the previous and shoehorn it all in. Whether it is balanced or not is all actively iterated throughout the expansion, and if anything particularly falls short they'll overcompensate for the next expansion (or conveniently forget about it altogether, like Shaman DPS specs)

[Paperfox]

They have learned how to monetize the game.