Why Is Blizzard Always At War With The Playerbase!?

[Mardux]

It's not entitlement it's my opinion and making a statement that I don't think gear means that much especially at the end of a tier and season and the notion that blizzard might keep more subscriptions with such a model. Not once did I ever said I deserve anything, stop projecting on to others. I simply came here to offer some insight and food for thought. PS you also come off very angry and hostile, you shouldn't get so worked up sport it's just a video game and a forum.

Yes, and your "opinion" projects entitlement. You think you should be able to get equitable gear as people who put meaningful time and effort into the game when you won't/can't put that same time and effort into getting the gear.

[Osmeric]

Come on man. This take is disingenuous as fuck. A majority of that "majority" that you're claiming left because of what was offered would have left anyway. By and large, players do not leave WoW because of the way it plays. They quit because they move on with their lives.

If you assume that, then you can defend anything, because all those who leave don't matter.

Your presumption that nothing could be done to retain those players is without justification. Had the game gone totally casual and the hardcores had left, you could have made exactly the same argument about them.

[MoanaLisa]

If you assume that, then you can defend anything, because all those who leave don't matter.

Your presumption that nothing could be done to retain those players is without justification. Had the game gone totally casual and the hardcores had left, you could have made exactly the same argument about them.

All of this simplistic BS aside, it's the natural order of things for people to move on with entertainment media. Big splash at the start; diminishing audiences after a time. Games, books, movies, music: Are we going to say that Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon is somehow less than it was because people don't buy it so much any longer? After all there are new generations coming into play every few years that could be part of the theoretical market.

Market saturation is a real thing. Trends in what sort of games are successful at any given time over the last 20 years is also a real thing. Increased competition, much of it now available as a free entry (with the bill coming later in the form of stores, boosts, etc.). The argument that expansions are like brand new games and should theoretically retain all of those that ever subscribed to the game is purest fantasy and anyone with half a brain knows and understands this. Like all things: it's complicated.

For the record I mostly agree with Osmeric that over time the design of the game has leaned into more difficulty with the content the developers think is the most important stuff in the game. And I'm quite sure that complicated and ever-changing classes over the years have also contributed. I also tend to believe that Blizzard's reluctance to de-emphasize raids to buff up other content is one reason why the game's casual audience has shrunk over the years.

But that's a different, smaller portion of "why people quit" than what amounts to a business cycle. WoW had an extraordinary run in the general culture, much more so than any other game of its type. Faddish even at some point. Fads fade. So too games. All games.

[Celement]

If you assume that, then you can defend anything, because all those who leave don't matter.

Your presumption that nothing could be done to retain those players is without justification. Had the game gone totally casual and the hardcores had left, you could have made exactly the same argument about them.

You could argue the reverse as well. If they abandoned the alternative leveling schemes ( ap, azerite, covenants,etc).

There is a good chance they could of retained a larger amount of players interested in group content but adverse to grinding trivial content.

[TbouncerT]

making a statement that I don't think gear means that much...

You lost all credibility right there when you said that part. Are we even playing the same game?

[AlmightyGerkin]

Apparently, the most recent Beta build actually removed this ability, unfortunately. I haven't logged in to the Beta to confirm myself just yet, but I was told it was the case by good authority.

They're working on and relating to a post on wowhead likely wont make it into DF but a small patch after

Edit: Link to wowhead article https://www.wowhead.com/news/weapon-...nflight-329444

[anon5123]

The game leads are hardcore raiders who only care about hardcore raid content..

Why do people keep saying this when "hardcore raid content" is a tiny fraction of the game? Even heroic raids are fully puggable.

[Revamp Man]

2. No it should not. Lfr is storymode. It should not even drop gear, let a lone an acheivement mount. Normal is braindead easy that each fated raid takes just an hour to do. It only took 3hrs over 3 weeks to complete.

Raid 1hr week 1. Go back to lvling alts, playing classic, watching movies etc.
Repeat week 2.
Repeat week 3.

It was the single easiest mount to get considering the fated affixs made the bosses a joke and easier than lfr.

that is still more effort and time investment than the moose which blizzard compared this to ignoring the obvious differences along with the fact that even though for most players who know how to clear the bosses with fated buffs youll still have groups that get like 3 stacks of mote buff on shriekwing

this is just a mount that says "i was here" otherwise they would have given it higher requirements but instead they placed it just out of reach for many. I do think that those who want it should go into normal and get it however i also think blizzard shouldnt just say "hey you guys did this for a single boss kill mount last time so try it again just now you need 30 bosses"

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I really want to play WoW again, I played Shadowlands and just got stuck on the M+ gear grind. I had never had to do this long of a grind to get where I wanted to in each content patch.

The new expansion does not look good. We were given the idea that Dragon Flight was going to go back to more core gameplay with other ways to progress in the game gear wise without using borrowed power. Even the talent trees are just a rework to make it look like you have choices, you can't choose different talent trees like many years ago and have to pick a main subclass talent tree just like before. The same seasonal gear grind persists that other MMOs have gotten away from.

Do they realize that there are all these people that want to play the game? Not the current version, but the more modern, less grindy version we all need. It has the best lore, and it's history goes all the way back 25+ years to when I was a kid. I hope they figure this out or Microsoft gives the IP to someone else.

i mean ive made like 3 builds in my spec but go off sis

[Ielenia]

Seriously, at this point, I just don't understand the logic behind some of the changes that they implement (or revert).

Blizzard isn't "at war". If anything, it's the other way around, actually. To make matters worse, it's a "war on multiple fronts": the player base is heavily fragmented, and can rarely agree on what they want, so when some changes happen that please parts A and B of the player base, parts C, D, E and F become disgruntled because they're unhappy with the changes. Then a new change pleases C and D, but A, B, E and F are not displeased.

The point is that Blizzard is basically in an unwinnable situation. No matter what they do, there will always be discontent, who will then cry out in forums, official and fan alike, about their displeasure, while those that are pleased by the changes will mostly keep to themselves, making it seem that the discontent is bigger than it actually is.

[Revamp Man]

i think its important to note that the playerbase is always at war with itself and the few times there was a unanimous feeling towards something was for cosmetics and transmog

[Aucald]

They're working on and relating to a post on wowhead likely wont make it into DF but a small patch after

That's good to hear, then. Never really understood the limitation itself.

[Relapses]

If you assume that, then you can defend anything, because all those who leave don't matter.

Your presumption that nothing could be done to retain those players is without justification. Had the game gone totally casual and the hardcores had left, you could have made exactly the same argument about them.

It's not a presumption. It's something that has been confirmed by somebody who has, y'know, actually seen WoW's retention data.

It's important not to paint things in broad strokes of Blizzard favoring either casual or hardcore players. There's room for both but when we let our arguments devolve into petty he-said/she-said finger pointing at whatever group of players one does not self-identify we're mostly spinning our wheels, often arguing semantics instead of actionable ways that Blizzard could actually impact the games' design.

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That's good to hear, then. Never really understood the limitation itself.

Like with most "obvious" changes Blizzard doesn't implement, I'd wager there's a lot of unforeseen layered effects which have the possibility of chain reacting in ways they don't intend. Artifacts get illusions but suddenly the fortress of invisible bunnies which holds together the entirety of Ardenweald becomes unstable. The game is built on 20+ years of pasta, this is just how things go.

[Aucald]

Like with most "obvious" changes Blizzard doesn't implement, I'd wager there's a lot of unforeseen layered effects which have the possibility of chain reacting in ways they don't intend. Artifacts get illusions but suddenly the fortress of invisible bunnies which holds together the entirety of Ardenweald becomes unstable. The game is built on 20+ years of pasta, this is just how things go.

True enough, it just seems like the cosmetic textures on a few weapon models seem rather disconnected from anything fundamental to the game, and as the brief window in the Beta showed, once the limitation was removed it was fine. As you said, though; one never knows how a seemingly innocuous bug can snowball into a shitshow of glitches that offlines a server cluster somewhere or sets a data center in the midwest on fire.

[Magnificent Madmartegan]

Seriously, at this point, I just don't understand the logic behind some of the changes that they implement (or revert).

Someone on the official forums put it perfectly that there are many easy wins they could implement that wouldn't negatively impact the player base:

• I̶l̶l̶u̶s̶i̶o̶n̶s̶ o̶n̶ a̶r̶t̶i̶f̶a̶c̶t̶s̶ (reverted)
• LFR Slimecat
  
• NO PATHFINDER
• Meaningful gear progression in open-world content that scales with new M+ and raiding seasons. Zereth Mortis gear caps somewhere around 250 ILV, M+ offers 304 from the vault, and raiding offers 311 on Mythic - let's reduce that gap by increasing ZM gear ILV to 275 at least.
• Artificial time gating for unlocking current expansion allied races (reputation grinds) - why not simply allow us to unlock them after finishing the story? You decided to allow that with past allied races anyways.

These are just a small list of things that I can't wrap my mind around.

Why is it that in a game that depends so heavily on the consumer supporting it, the developers don't at least acknowledge that their philosophies are archaic and move towards making meaningful changes?

I'm a bit jaded; at the very least, I feel we are entitled to some visibility from them.

Why must your gear progression be on par or near what raiders and mythic plusers get? If all you're doing is world content, which requires the least amount of effort in the game then why should your reward be on par with those that put more effort, time and skill into the game then you? If all you do is level and quest your "reward" is leveling, exploration and reputation. You want meaningful gear progression yet the gear you're rewarded is easily high enough, therefore meaningful, for you to get done what you need to get done. Until they make outdoor content remotely close to on par with mythic + or raids then why must the reward be so?

[Nerdkartoffl]

You CANNOT be serious, can you? Do you honestly think thats the situation? You HONESTLY think these people are asking to spend 10 hours in the open world for a CHANCE at an item? This level of dishonesty just cant be real, no one could honestly think this is an honest and fair comparison.

Its as simple as this - "open world" players want close to the best gear in the game with ZERO effort other than logging in and mindlessly grinding braindead content while watching anime. Its always the same, skirting around the truth because even they/you know its an absolutely idiotic request and expectation. Every single one of these threads ALWAYS ends the same - with the "casuals" (not actually casual, just EXTREMELY lazy) admitting they want gear better than heroic raid gear, if not as good as mythic, for farming braindead world quests.

And every time a new one pops up the exact same argument occurs, while they awkwardly squirm and twist pretending thats NOT what is being asked for.

Now, obviously "40 levels below normal dungeon" was A) Trolling to get a rise (it worked on you) or B) Hyperbole. You know this.

Does it hurt your pride, when someone in a GAME is getting a virtuell token with "less effort" that is 10% weaker instead of 50%?
Are you so bad at life, that everything that counts is bound to a metric in a game, that is repeating the same spiel every few month?

You must be utterly stupid to think that the gear you grind again and again and again (every patch) is worth a flying fuck.

You are one good example of petty.
"I did play all this time and i dont want anyone to have the "same" with less effort".
You cant grasp the idea, that they could add a mechanic so "casuals" could catch up, but simply take longer.

If they would delete GS in mystic raiding and m+ 15 and above where only cosmetic, would you participate?
I think not, because you seem to NEED to be ahead in terms of GS, so you can fap on your great archievements.

Many people could do a 15+ and watch netflix in the meantime. The "hard" part you point at, is invalid.
Touch some grass mate. You are looong overdue.

[Toppy]

i like how blizz has repeatedly admitted to ignoring feedback and told fans they were wrong to want to do X. How on multiple occasions there has been a strong, unquestionable consensus on subjects to the point where blizz later admitted they were wrong.

Yet we're going to pretend that blizz simply cant be expected to listen to such a "disjointed" fanbase.

Blizzard is a bad, crappy, company that has openly and unquestionably considered their fanbase as a thing to ignore and ridicule.

[Aucald]

While that's true, I think they sometimes do a really bad job of picking sides in a way that turns off half the playerbase more than the other option would have. I'm specifically thinking about pathfinder - when it came out, I had a lot of friends who were like, "So what, I basically have that done already, it's easy, seems good to me!"

Personally, I had leveled in dungeons that expansion and didn't have a single loremaster achieve, so I had to go back and do hundreds of quests. You had to get 100 treasures, and I had 2 - I didn't even know they existed, so I had to download some addon that told me where they all were so I could go get 100. Since then, I've never leveled in dungeons again (my preferred mode) - I level with the wowhead instructions for pathfinder open on my pc and make damn sure I check every one off the first time.

Yes, I can understand that people have opposite views on flying, but think about the impact pathfinder had - the people who liked pathfinder content were already doing most of it anyway, so the main impact of adding pathfinder was it pushed the people who didn't like that content into doing it. How is that a good decision? The people whose gameplay was most affected by the decision - people like me - were also the people who were most opposed to it. They should be making decisions that encourage the segment of the playerbase that likes an activity to do more of it - not making decisions that pushes people into the content they don't like!

And that's your experience, and I won't discount it or its importance to you - but it also sort of illustrates the basic point I'm making. The developers can't really make a decision that the entire player base approves or disapproves of, because everyone has their own tack, their own playstyle, and are hit in different ways by any development decision made in WoW. Pathfinder specifically has a huge variety in player responses, from people like you who feel disadvantaged by it due to the way they're accustomed to engaging with WoW, to people who already do all the things Pathfinder requires and are completely unaffected, to people who honestly don't care either way, to people that are glad to have something to do in the game and enjoy accruing achievements for their own sake. There's not a monolith in terms of responses, there's not even a plurality - it's just different people who react to the different decisions in a dozen different ways. And to extend on that, everyone considers their method to be the superior (or sometimes the only) method of engagement with the game, because, well, it's their method and their enjoyment on the line. We're all kind of self-interested in that particular vein, and when the developers make decisions that run counter to the way we prefer things, we can't help but feel singled out.

[Lordofbelbol]

Does it hurt your pride, when someone in a GAME is getting a virtuell token with "less effort" that is 10% weaker instead of 50%?
Are you so bad at life, that everything that counts is bound to a metric in a game, that is repeating the same spiel every few month?

You must be utterly stupid to think that the gear you grind again and again and again (every patch) is worth a flying fuck.

You are one good example of petty.
"I did play all this time and i dont want anyone to have the "same" with less effort".
You cant grasp the idea, that they could add a mechanic so "casuals" could catch up, but simply take longer.

If they would delete GS in mystic raiding and m+ 15 and above where only cosmetic, would you participate?
I think not, because you seem to NEED to be ahead in terms of GS, so you can fap on your great archievements.

Many people could do a 15+ and watch netflix in the meantime. The "hard" part you point at, is invalid.
Touch some grass mate. You are looong overdue.

The moment you typed "GS" and "myStic" raiding it's clear you haven't done any or maybe 1-5 15s and don't know what u are saying, therefore you can't just suggest stuff and you never felt how the other side feel.

[Ibiza177]

Does it hurt your pride, when someone in a GAME is getting a virtuell token with "less effort" that is 10% weaker instead of 50%?
Are you so bad at life, that everything that counts is bound to a metric in a game, that is repeating the same spiel every few month?

You must be utterly stupid to think that the gear you grind again and again and again (every patch) is worth a flying fuck.

You are one good example of petty.
"I did play all this time and i dont want anyone to have the "same" with less effort".
You cant grasp the idea, that they could add a mechanic so "casuals" could catch up, but simply take longer.

If they would delete GS in mystic raiding and m+ 15 and above where only cosmetic, would you participate?
I think not, because you seem to NEED to be ahead in terms of GS, so you can fap on your great archievements.

Many people could do a 15+ and watch netflix in the meantime. The "hard" part you point at, is invalid.
Touch some grass mate. You are looong overdue.

Hmmmmm now this guy is what's wrong with the game, cry more. Hot take, if you're a casual, you DESERVE casual stuff and nothing more. Sucks growing up and not having the time we use to in highschool or college. Also life is the same way. Live within your means or play the lottery, maybe you'll get lucky, gotta put work in to EARN shit.

My take is you either don't have time to play the game like we all use to OR (MORE likely) your skill at the game is poor so you can't anyways (which is 100% fine) maybe just practice more to hone your skills to get into more challenging content, instead of complaining "wahhh I should be the same as people who compete at a higher level even though I can't!" Take your welfare loot from the vault and catalyst and be happy, should be good enough for anyone.

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I am not saying one view is right or wrong but I offer up food for thought. People generally want to feel like their time is not being wasted. If raids offered no gear and instead were only done for speed trials, the number of people that did them would be vastly lower. We see this with people who get BiS and either just raid log or wait for the next expansion (or play an alt). With out door content, dungeons, PvP the same can be considered to be true also. If you can get to a point where you're not longer progressing then the content no longer has a reward and we're now "wasting" our time. There where you start to see people unsubscribe or come here and start complaining. Now if there were a system in place where people could do these types of content and eventually get the best or near to the best gear then they would continue to do this content. Take away the treadmill and honestly large portions of the game really aren't that fun and people quit.

Now look at another group of players. They are probably in their mid to late 30's they rock the dad/mom bod and they have work, kids and anything else life throws at them. They love MMO's but they don't have a schedule that permits commitment to a raiding guild or perhaps the ability to sit down and raid for a solid hour. I fall into this category. I don't have the ability to commit to doing arenas with friends because my schedule is sporadic; I cannot commit to a raid schedule because again same reason. I however am very competitive. So when I know i cannot get the best gear in the game because my schedule is prohibative then I tend to not want to play. This happend with Classic Vanilla when it released and I realized at the time my schedule did not permit me to raid and pvp at the level I wanted to. I ended up unsubbing until TBC. However, If i could log in play when i could and stick to some kind of solo'ish gear grind I would continue playing.

The argument of why does it matter if I have raid gear from solo content V why do you need raid gear if all you do is solo content isn't a one size fits all. Truth for me is sometimes I have the time to arena but who wants to do arena with someone that has lower gear. Sometimes I can raid but who wants to do a raid with someone with lower gear. See it locks me out of the ability to even achieve that. Now this is just my circumstance and the above is a mix of that as well along with food for thought. End of the day I think it's fine if solo content or a least lower end content like LFR/BGs/Dungeons (with LFG) reward BiS, HOWEVER, I don't think it should be day one. I think that progression should take most of the raid tier/ arena season. Give me an opportunity to perform said content eventually, doesn't really devalue your time and effort because let's be honest I probably put in far more time and lastly when the next tier/season releases I am up to par with everyone else and not another entire tier behind.

Your last paragraph is actually a very respectable take, I feel for that and I actually agree with that.

[OrangeJuice]

nobody is at war. Blizz acts and players obey. its insanity. I warned yall months ago they would pull this shit.