The 1 thing Blizzard really failed with Legion

[Niwes]

Hey there,

Intro:

You could argue a lot pro or against several stuff existing (or not existing) in Legion. Thats all up to personal oppinions. This is NOT a thread for that.

Ppl are also discussing a lot of IF (it seems many ppl agree here, imo) and HOW alt-unfriendly Legion is (this is hard discussed). If you want to discuss alt-friendly'ness of Legion, this is NOT a thread for that.

Topic:

Lets state that "Legion is not the alt-friendliest xpac of all xpacs ever released", regardless HOW altfriendly or not (to not derail it, see above). So what i can not understand, from a logical point of view, is the following:

Why did Blizzard shared their (very rare) development time like they did with Legion ? What they did is the following:

- Implement own class quests for every class
- Implement own artifacts for every class
- Implement class mounts for every class
- Implement artifact styles and quests for every class
- Implement specific challenges for every class
- Implement specific Legendaries for every class
- etc.

in short: they dedicated A LOT specific to the classes of the game.

I think everyone will look at this as a fact. Its the obviously main property of Legion.

Now lets look at the benefit. Since many many ppl only play 1 class, they have literally no benefit at all of this, since they never see or care of what other classes have.

That leads us (thats the topic here) to the following conclusion:

Most added value in Legion, to get something out of the increased development effort of blizzard, is to consume more than 1 class (or, to a degree, spec). I would say this could we also declare a fact (its hard not to).

So why the hell is exactly that one addon, that shifted a lot of development time into class specifics, the same addon that make it hard to play alts and consume all the other classes stuff ? The same addon that progresses hard, dedicated to 1 class ? The same addon that have a lot of class specific farm content ? And so on.

On the other side it is the same addon, that added tripple spec.

To me, from a logical point of view, it seems extremely weird, because its like they worked against their own descissions and against their own development investment.

Whats the sense of developing a lot of stuff where every player could only consume a 12th of your development work ? In a xpac that supports this?

I even dont should think about what Legion could be, when all that development time was invested in content. Legion did better than WoD (at least to some degree). imagine HOW Legion could be, if all that development was invested in content for all players/classes ?

I dont get it why they made a xpac that seems to work against itself. and therefore loose a lot of benefit for their development investment.

So, this is the topic. Imo blizzard failed in using their development time accordingly, by working against the benefits of their own created natural way that xpac has.

Or in short: It would make sense if Legion would be the alt-friendliest xpac ever existed with added support for playing many classes, to get some benefit out of huge development investment in the 12 classes. but its the other way around. thats totally weird imo.

PS: Plz do not derail this thread by posts derailing this thread into one of the many existing standard Legion threads (altfriendly, legendaries, AP, etc.). This thread is about the natural directive of this xpac and how it works or not works against this natural direction, and about effort/time investment of blizzard and the benefit of it. thx!

/discuss

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i watched the last QA a few mins ago. lol, even Ion "now learned" that developing for 12 classes has not much outcome for the single player. lol, this is ofc something that MUST be learned first.

not a single reply yet. what is the problem? too complex, or too obvious, or too much text, or too far away for the standard "meh got no epixx" wow crowd or what ? not a single reply in 3 hours. on MMOC. crazy.

A typical Jaylock thread would have around 80 posts in this second. what a fucked up world (of warcraft).

[Baine]

The thing is Jaylock's threads usually do not have a wall of text. Not that having such a wall is bad, but many will lose interest because of it.

On topic. I do not have the time to write a long answer. Even if I agree that expansion is an invitation to explore many classes with unique content, I think Blizzard did not want us to skip it on alts precisely because it is unique content.

[Benomatic]

Is there a way to clear up the topic? Not a too long, didn't read but more of a clear, concise and accurate.

[Dhrizzle]

Blizz have always maintained that class-specific content is a poor use of resources because it won't benefit all players, but people still wanted it so Blizz decided to focus on it for this expansion.

Maybe it could be deemed a "failure" and they don't go for a similar system in the future but I don't think Blizz should shy away from listening to feedback and trying different things even if it ends up only pleasing a minority.

[Deleted]

Becouse you are not supostu consume everything? And no you are not supostu play mupltiple characteres in MMORGP game. This *** becom thing becouse blizzard went with game so casual that we run out of stuff to do. So players start leveling new chars. Fact is. Players doesnt like playing multiple characters. They did it only becouse there was nothing els to do in previous exp nothing els. And playing alts isnt horrible. You are just **** what thinks that you deserver for some reason to have all his chars on exact same power and progression level as main chars. No alts deserevr to be behind.

[Puri]

First of all: Let's state the world's favourite color is yellow, regardless if this is true or not (to not derail it, see above).

Why is it yellow? I don't like yellow. Yellow is so bright and you cannot easily create it if you have blue and black.
It would be so much better if the world's favourite color would be blue. Why can't it be blue?

Plz do not derail this thread by posts derailing this thread into one of the many existing standard threads.

[IceMan1763]

I posted this EXACT criticism of the xpac design probably in Sept. or Oct. on the main Blizzard forums. They invest TONS of dev time developing all these different artifacts (and the quests and everything else which support them), then add game systems which make it extremely difficult to spend time on more than one character or even spec (especially if you raid at heroic or mythic level).

It makes ZERO sense. Of course, I expect that from this dev team nowadays.

[laplacedemon]

too much text

In short you said "Blizzard spent a lot of effort on class specific content without even making it alt-friendly and it doesn't make sense", but took a bit too long to say it.

I think they miscalculated the reaction of an average player. Maybe they expected that after completing a class campaign, getting artifacts etc people would be more keen on playing another class; however that might not be the case and people might be sticking to their mains after all.

[IceMan1763]

In short you said "Blizzard spent a lot of effort on class specific content without even making it alt-friendly and it doesn't make sense", but took a bit too long to say it.

I think they miscalculated the reaction of an average player. Maybe they expected that after completing a class campaign, getting artifacts etc people would be more keen on playing another class; however that might not be the case and people might be sticking to their mains after all.

I think people are sticking to their mains because the expansion is not alt friendly. The expansion is not alt friendly because of the incredibly transparent decisions to not limit character power for AP, M+ loot, and legendary drops. There is no "stopping point" each week in this expansion, and that was an important part of the game design for me as I was both a high difficulty level raider and someone who enjoyed playing both alternate specs and alternate characters. That play style was ravaged this xpac to the point where you had to either give up high level raiding or stick to one spec to make sure you could keep up with what I call the "outside of raid time investment requirements". And no, it's a game, so nothing is "required", but you simply cannot beat certain raid bosses without a certain level of time investment outside of the raid in this xpac. That's a fact and something new to this xpac... there was some time investment before but it was always limited and typically isolated to the first few weeks of launch.

[Sam the Wiser]

A typical Jaylock thread would have around 80 posts in this second. what a fucked up world (of warcraft).

OP, the reason you didn't get the response Jaylock does is because you didn't put out easy bait. Here's an easy example, "male genital mutilation should be outlawed! My dick is uncut and the sex is 100x better!" This right here is 100% fool proof to get pages of replies. Learn from the master and you to will get dozens of easy pages!

[Deleted]

People are crying 24/7 and they love to do so.

Look at the amount of hate that was thrown towards blizzard during WoD.

Now compare WoD and Legion. It's a completly different game and people are still acting as if its the WORST exp in the history.
There are many aspects of the game which you can discuss and you can do that for a very long time.

For example legendaries.

They exist. They cause a lot of trouble and hate and you can discuss these topics related to legendaries:

1. Should they be in the game?
2. Should droprates be higher?
3. Should you be able to chose your legendary?
4. Should there be BiS legendaries?
5. Should you be fixed to stay on your spec if you have legendary for that spec?
6. Should content be tuned around having legendaries?
7. Should legendaries be worked around legendaries from earlier expansions or even other games? i.e. finding 200 legendaries in diablo 2 but never getting your Bis legendary?
8. Should you be allowed to cry if you dont have your bis legendary after 1 week of playing after launch?
9. Should you be able to get your bis legendary if you suck at playing the class, only raiding normal raids but still demand on getting the bis one?
10. Bad luck mechanic?
11. What will happen to ledgys after legion? Will you now have 18 legendaries in your stash which are tied to 110 and you will farm 18 new ones in the next expansion?


I think I could go on and on. At the end of the day, people will still complain, because they are only indiviums sitting in the front of their pc and if they dont get their best item, they are freaking mad. I have done alot of normal raids, will many shitty players. They loot legendaries and don't know if they are bis or good or even shit. After checking youtube they complain "its not Bis!!" and they still suck and do 200k dps.

Hoping for a certain legendary is indeed a good feeling. Looting one too. But I think the game would be much more better without them.

[Super Kami Dende]

People (like myself) wanted more Class Specific things.

We got them.

Not a fail to me in any way.

[Dracullus]

I don't think so. It's pretty obvious that last raid tier will last longer than 5 months (I think 7.3.5 launch on January and 8.0 prepatch around September). We will have plenty time to enjoy other classes quests. Even now, from June to 7.3 release most will have Legionfall paragon trait - so there will be no point farming AP anymore. Even if we ignore alts, it's cool that you have little different experience than your friends and can share it with them.

But also I think main content should always have priority. In 7.0 it was fine - we had many story content outside class campaign. For content patches they don't have same resources (most manpower obviously go to next expansion), so they must manage it more wisely. Otherwise we have 7.2, when there is ton of content... spreaded on 12 classes and 36 artifacts. If I remember correctly, Ion said on Q&A that they won't continue class specific stuff on 7.3, so there is hope for Argus to be Suramar 2.0.

[clevin]

The expansion IS alt friendly... and IS NOT alt friendly. Let me explain...

If you just want to level to 110, get ~35 or so traits and mess around, doing heroic 5 mans, LFR, maybe a normal raid and WQs etc it's incredibly easy to do that once you have one main with max AK. You can buy tomes to get alts high AK which makes getting the first ~35 traits or so easy and fast. Gearing them was a bit of a pain before 7.2 but now you can take them to BS and get enough 850 Dauntless drops to gear up pretty fast (never mind the 880 stuff from shards). For this audience, Legion is very alt friendly.

If you want to raid at a high level (mythic, basically) and/or do high key M+runs you need to not just hit 35 traits and casually work those higher, you need to get 42+ and keep progressing which takes a lot of time (42 isn't too bad but past that it gets painful). The 880 BS gear isn't going to cut it mostly so you'll need to do ~+15 M+ etc. And show up for raid nights. Doing this for one class is doable but more work that in the past for most people. Doing it for several classes is basically a full time job now. For this audience, Legion isn't alt friendly at all.

That's really it. The closer a person is to group 1, the more alt friendly. The closer to group 2, the less.

Why invest in class specific stuff? Because they know that most people are probably in the first group or close to it. The reason they did the class specific stuff is because, I think, they feel that classes and the distinction between them are a core part of the game. And in that, they're right and Street and all the Player > Class people were utterly wrong.

[Swalload]

The first problem here is that you are mistaking the true goal behind the concept of classes. It's not really to add content (although it is for the people who have too much time on their hand) it's mainly to add choices.

Choices aren't meant to ALL be experienced, it's to give a sense of engagement and variety so people can have a different experience from one another.

For exemple, there's a lot of games nowaday with several dialogue options that actually add real content, but this was never made with the idea of "everybody will go through the game 3 times to see it all". Instead it's more like "a very few people will experience it all but most will do it once and enjoy the freedom of choices". For this simple reason, most of the time it's worth it.
In Legion I agree there is a shitload of effort put into this, I think they went too deep with the specs, should have limited the content to class only, I enjoy playing a class fully, all the specs, I don't see any benefit from playing only a third of a class.

[Deleted]

i watched the last QA a few mins ago. lol, even Ion "now learned" that developing for 12 classes has not much outcome for the single player

That's because people can't jump right in and do the content. Even the 7.0 class quests, to do them all you need to be level 110 on a class, so even if you have that class, that's a big time commitment. It's sad, because class quests are great and class quests are the real content in 7.2, but you need to make them more accessible. Dropping the exalted requirement was a good first step. Maybe to remove all the hurdles, we either need to get rid of levels, or have them all be available at level 100 and have the Broken Shore and Suramar scale with level, too.

[clevin]

The first problem here is that you are mistaking the true goal behind the concept of classes. It's not really to add content (although it is for the people who have too much time on their hand) it's mainly to add choices.

Choices aren't meant to ALL be experienced, it's to give a sense of engagement and variety so people can have a different experience from one another.

Well said. I'd expand on this by noting that if you DO roll an alt and it feels different, that's a positive thing.

[Niwes]

I posted this EXACT criticism of the xpac design probably in Sept. or Oct. on the main Blizzard forums. They invest TONS of dev time developing all these different artifacts (and the quests and everything else which support them), then add game systems which make it extremely difficult to spend time on more than one character or even spec (especially if you raid at heroic or mythic level).

It makes ZERO sense. Of course, I expect that from this dev team nowadays.

yep. thats exactly what i mean.

in the first place it doesnt matter what you implement, since its based on different oppinions. you cant please everyone. as long as you implement things you think some of your playerbase wants, its fine. so, its not the "what". but when you implement stuff, then normally you do it in such a way it makes sense. not in a way you that makes you a lot of effort, while hindering ppl to consume your effort.

as Ion Hazzikostas said in ther interview 2 days ago:

"we learned, i learned that it is not a good use of dev resources to build stuff where always 1/12th of the playerbase has use of. for us patch 7.2 was the biggest patch ever, but not for the player since he see only a 12th of it. we will drive away from class specific things ongoing to 7.3."

i formyself felt laughing from my chair. i mean: really ??? you have to "learn" that ? and you learned it that late ? how stupid must ppl be at blizzard. that is a giant company with ppl working since decades in that businees. the outcome of the above concept a 10 year old boy could see lightyears before. wtf is going on with them? how stupid must ppl be to dont see that coming and that it makes ZERO sense ???

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OP, the reason you didn't get the response Jaylock does is because you didn't put out easy bait. Here's an easy example, "male genital mutilation should be outlawed! My dick is uncut and the sex is 100x better!" This right here is 100% fool proof to get pages of replies. Learn from the master and you to will get dozens of easy pages!

ofc i know. thats why i said it. thats why i said "sad world". ppl these days seems like dull idiots just want to consume small easy parts, dont wanna read, post 2 lines to shit their oppinion in and leave. its all fastpaced superficial idiot stuff these days. and thats why Jaylock threads work like a charm.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't think so. It's pretty obvious that last raid tier will last longer than 5 months (I think 7.3.5 launch on January and 8.0 prepatch around September). We will have plenty time to enjoy other classes quests. Even now, from June to 7.3 release most will have Legionfall paragon trait - so there will be no point farming AP anymore. Even if we ignore alts, it's cool that you have little different experience than your friends and can share it with them.

But also I think main content should always have priority. In 7.0 it was fine - we had many story content outside class campaign. For content patches they don't have same resources (most manpower obviously go to next expansion), so they must manage it more wisely. Otherwise we have 7.2, when there is ton of content... spreaded on 12 classes and 36 artifacts. If I remember correctly, Ion said on Q&A that they won't continue class specific stuff on 7.3, so there is hope for Argus to be Suramar 2.0.

yep. good point. because it differentiates it, where it is good and where not.

- - - Updated - - -

The expansion IS alt friendly... and IS NOT alt friendly. Let me explain...

If you just want to level to 110, get ~35 or so traits and mess around, doing heroic 5 mans, LFR, maybe a normal raid and WQs etc it's incredibly easy to do that once you have one main with max AK. You can buy tomes to get alts high AK which makes getting the first ~35 traits or so easy and fast. Gearing them was a bit of a pain before 7.2 but now you can take them to BS and get enough 850 Dauntless drops to gear up pretty fast (never mind the 880 stuff from shards). For this audience, Legion is very alt friendly.

If you want to raid at a high level (mythic, basically) and/or do high key M+runs you need to not just hit 35 traits and casually work those higher, you need to get 42+ and keep progressing which takes a lot of time (42 isn't too bad but past that it gets painful). The 880 BS gear isn't going to cut it mostly so you'll need to do ~+15 M+ etc. And show up for raid nights. Doing this for one class is doable but more work that in the past for most people. Doing it for several classes is basically a full time job now. For this audience, Legion isn't alt friendly at all.

That's really it. The closer a person is to group 1, the more alt friendly. The closer to group 2, the less.

Why invest in class specific stuff? Because they know that most people are probably in the first group or close to it. The reason they did the class specific stuff is because, I think, they feel that classes and the distinction between them are a core part of the game. And in that, they're right and Street and all the Player > Class people were utterly wrong.

i agree. foremost to the top part of your post. its exactly that.

[Flurryfang]

Hey there,

Intro:

You could argue a lot pro or against several stuff existing (or not existing) in Legion. Thats all up to personal oppinions. This is NOT a thread for that.

Ppl are also discussing a lot of IF (it seems many ppl agree here, imo) and HOW alt-unfriendly Legion is (this is hard discussed). If you want to discuss alt-friendly'ness of Legion, this is NOT a thread for that.

Topic:

Lets state that "Legion is not the alt-friendliest xpac of all xpacs ever released", regardless HOW altfriendly or not (to not derail it, see above). So what i can not understand, from a logical point of view, is the following:

Why did Blizzard shared their (very rare) development time like they did with Legion ? What they did is the following:

- Implement own class quests for every class
- Implement own artifacts for every class
- Implement class mounts for every class
- Implement artifact styles and quests for every class
- Implement specific challenges for every class
- Implement specific Legendaries for every class
- etc.

in short: they dedicated A LOT specific to the classes of the game.

I think everyone will look at this as a fact. Its the obviously main property of Legion.

Now lets look at the benefit. Since many many ppl only play 1 class, they have literally no benefit at all of this, since they never see or care of what other classes have.

That leads us (thats the topic here) to the following conclusion:

Most added value in Legion, to get something out of the increased development effort of blizzard, is to consume more than 1 class (or, to a degree, spec). I would say this could we also declare a fact (its hard not to).

So why the hell is exactly that one addon, that shifted a lot of development time into class specifics, the same addon that make it hard to play alts and consume all the other classes stuff ? The same addon that progresses hard, dedicated to 1 class ? The same addon that have a lot of class specific farm content ? And so on.

On the other side it is the same addon, that added tripple spec.

To me, from a logical point of view, it seems extremely weird, because its like they worked against their own descissions and against their own development investment.

Whats the sense of developing a lot of stuff where every player could only consume a 12th of your development work ? In a xpac that supports this?

I even dont should think about what Legion could be, when all that development time was invested in content. Legion did better than WoD (at least to some degree). imagine HOW Legion could be, if all that development was invested in content for all players/classes ?

I dont get it why they made a xpac that seems to work against itself. and therefore loose a lot of benefit for their development investment.

So, this is the topic. Imo blizzard failed in using their development time accordingly, by working against the benefits of their own created natural way that xpac has.

Or in short: It would make sense if Legion would be the alt-friendliest xpac ever existed with added support for playing many classes, to get some benefit out of huge development investment in the 12 classes. but its the other way around. thats totally weird imo.

PS: Plz do not derail this thread by posts derailing this thread into one of the many existing standard Legion threads (altfriendly, legendaries, AP, etc.). This thread is about the natural directive of this xpac and how it works or not works against this natural direction, and about effort/time investment of blizzard and the benefit of it. thx!

/discuss

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i watched the last QA a few mins ago. lol, even Ion "now learned" that developing for 12 classes has not much outcome for the single player. lol, this is ofc something that MUST be learned first.

not a single reply yet. what is the problem? too complex, or too obvious, or too much text, or too far away for the standard "meh got no epixx" wow crowd or what ? not a single reply in 3 hours. on MMOC. crazy.

A typical Jaylock thread would have around 80 posts in this second. what a fucked up world (of warcraft).

It all comes down to a question many players asked with the arrival of MoP and WoD with the "bring the player, not the class" statement: Why should we ever play another class, if there is no difference between the classes when it comes to filling out roles?

Blizzard tried to combat that statement with Legion. There is now a huge difference between playing different classes and you are rewarded with unique mechanics, unique story and sometimes amazing plot points if you are the player who plays alot of alts.

So should they have made leveling easier or not be to hard on alts in Legion?? Well sure, they proberly should have, but does it work against their focus on class unique content? Not really. Most of the unique class content can be aquired after you hit lvl 110 and requires nothing of you when it comes to item lvl grinding. They have even shown this with their change to the unique mount quest, which no longer require you to be exalted with Legionfall and therefore any alt can now do it within a decent amount of time.


Blizzard have not done a perfect job when it comes to the content design of Legion, but it is still very good. An important thing to point out, is that even though many players are not playing more then 2-3 alts atm, when we hit some form of content drought (nearly no matter how long it lasts), we will see people going into alts and they will experience and consume this unique content and it might keep them subbed even after their raiding is put on hold.

[Noxina]

I honestly had to read your wall of text twice to really figure out what you're talking about, too much text in bad English makes it hard to read it, and to understand it.

And adding edits like "Jaylock would get more replies than me QQ" doesn't help.


I, personally, liked how they made unique stuff for each class. I don't play many alts, as I focus mostly on one character, and have done that since Vanilla (switching mains every now and then). But I do have 5 lvl 110's, with AK rolling all the time, making it rather easy to swap char if I wanted to.
So, as someone allready pointed out, being a casual player this expansion is very alt friendly, thus making it easy to check out all the content they released for all the classes if that is of interest.
However, they might have had too much focus on those unique class chains. But personally I don't mind. I always have something to do on my main, there is always m+ to be farmed, raids to be cleared and farming to be done. I can't remember last time I have played this long on a single character and not get burned out too much.
Also, all you have to do on alts to keep them somewhat up to date is clear a m10 each week for the weekly chest and 900+ piece. Can't remember it being that easy before, well except Garrison gear, that was a bit easier.

I hope I understood what you where trying to say. Next time try to be more right on the point with short text, if you want quick replies as your idol, Jaylock gets. Write down your text in word, read through it a couple of times, remove all trash (not needed lines of blabla), and get to your point early in the post as most people read 3 lines then give up.
Good luck in the future, hope you one day obtain your dream of a famous thread.