Patch 8.3 Hotfixes - February 20, 2020

[Lanrefni]

And still no fix for Anzu.

[chiddie]

Accurate. But that's too much like thinking logically.

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Or the guy who finishes his cloak in 1 month might continue working on his cloak... or might play a different character... or might run keys... or might do any-fucking-thing else in the game.

The reason you're pretending that upgrading the cloak is the only thing to do in the game will forever be lost to me.

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No it wouldnt. Because MAUs are what they base their success on. Not much /played someone has on a single character.

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You saying it works like this doesnt mean it does...

You are denying that everything is time gated with the main purpose to make stuff last the longest possible?

Really?

[Relapses]

You are denying that everything is time gated with the main purpose to make stuff last the longest possible?

Really?

Nobody is denying that time gates exist. The idea that time gates exist only to "keep people subbed" is the myth. In reality, if a player dislikes the way content is distributed they simply unsub. It's only on forums and negativity echo chambers like reddit where players make shitty memes about hating a game yet continuing to happily fork over their monthly sub.

[chiddie]

Nobody is denying that time gates exist. The idea that time gates exist only to "keep people subbed" is the myth. In reality, if a player dislikes the way content is distributed they simply unsub. It's only on forums and negativity echo chambers like reddit where players make shitty memes about hating a game yet continuing to happily fork over their monthly sub.

It’s not only, maybe. But mainly, yes.

Of course content has to be fun also, but it “has” to take time.

[Tiwack]

But playtime is irrelevant to Blizzards earnings, only subscription is what matters. People just throw this around as a meme for everything they don't like.

While correct it, it's an industry-chosen standard to compare user-bases and moneymaking potential for company shareholders.

[bullseyed]

Nobody is denying that time gates exist. The idea that time gates exist only to "keep people subbed" is the myth. In reality, if a player dislikes the way content is distributed they simply unsub. It's only on forums and negativity echo chambers like reddit where players make shitty memes about hating a game yet continuing to happily fork over their monthly sub.

This.

Timegating is good because it gives people stuff to do over time. It's bad because you feel like you have to do it every day if you care about prog.

Catch-up mechanics and soft-caps allow the good and limit the bad. Like limiting the weekly cloak upgrades, while allowing people to easily farm 4-7 vessels a week. Probably spend 1 hr a day on dailies and end up doing 4 runs a week minimum, ending the week with 5 vessels and 20,000+ currency (effectively 7 vessels).

If you take a few weeks off, you can catch up on weeks like next week when you only need 1 run but will do 4 or 5 to not cap currency.

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While correct it, it's an industry-chosen standard to compare user-bases and moneymaking potential for company shareholders.

False. Playtime is not a metric shown to shareholders.

People who log in once a month for a year is shown, which is the same thing as subscriptions.

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They should have rather fixed the common issue where not more than 2 Torn Page of "Fear and Flesh" could drop in a Horrific Vision.

That would mean that people had to full clear visions this week, when the average casual/bad is expected to only be doing 2 zone clears.

[Sithalos]

Horrific Visions
Fixed a rare issue where more than 2 Torn Page of "Fear and Flesh" could drop in a Horrific Vision.

Fixed a rare issue that caused us to make a system better.

[Nevcairiel]

Fixed a rare issue that caused us to make a system better.

Its not really "better" if it happens in odd cases to very few people.

But fear not, in the upcoming hotfixes, they allowed those pages to yield always 4 if you clear 4 areas. Should make catch-up easier for people a bit late to the party.

[hyphnos]

I really don't get the time played thing. Whether someone plays one day a week, or every day for 12 hours a day, they both still pay 15$ a month.

It matters because the are aware of psychology and the psychology of addiction and how to use those things to increase the "value" they can extract from a player.

Years ago, they crowed about sub numbers because a sub meant $15/month of repeat revenue and that was considered a good thing. The gaming industry now values how many hours they have control of your eyeballs and attention and thus they report these metrics. People on Wall Street want to know these metrics, not because they care how much fun or even how many hrs a week people are playing world of warcraft. They care because they know because the industry knows these an indicator of the company's ability to monetize customers.

It is important to investors to understand the revenue model. In WoW's case, subscriptions used to be big part of it. Now the model appears to be, release something every 2 years to roughly 3.5 million sales at 50 to 80 bucks a pop and then sell as many tokens, mounts and add on services as possible to those people. This can only happen when they are "engaged" with your product. What does "engagement" mean to a guy counting beans.. it doesn't mean "having fun" - it may just as well mean, will customers buy a token to get gold every X days because the game is structured in a way that if you play X hrs ignoring goldmaking you run a deficit just small enough that people will buy that token.

It's not hard to think up why they time gate things. They also know that if you can log in every 3 days or every 5 or every 7 you soon learn that you can not log in at all and then it's even harder to "engage" with your wallet.

Sure, they could take the risk of designing the game in such a way that players would do it for fun but that would be risking their job and that's what you do on the front end of an MMO. Once you have people with massive sunk costs, then you string them along and do what ATVI is doing with Wow. Not because it has to be that way, but because it is the least risky way and follows a business model that the CEO understands. Release things every year or two in a property and get a bump of money for as little investment as possible and grab as much extra in microtransactions as you can.

Not a conspiracy theory and doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand. Publicly traded companies have to answer to investors who don't know and don't want to know about rep grinds, they want to know roughly how many $ come from how many player hours. Thus those metrics get reported and you can bet the people designing the game are not only pressured but basically told to design around that and no billion dollar operation is unaware of much less ignoring the psychology of addiction in their planning because $$$$$

that's all there is to it.