Does Blizzard even have a design philosophy?

[Haidaes]

They have one, but they constantly change it when new people come into power because they think the lessons of the previous team don't apply to them. That is why Blizzard keeps repeating the same mistakes they've already told us about 10 years ago. Not all of it might be on the new guys though, some things may just me mandated, we don't know enough about their internal workflow to judge that, but it seems plausible enough.

Coming up with new things is a good idea as well. Just keeping the old stuff and doing it over and over gets stale extremely quickly. The problem simply arises from the fact that Blizzard styalized coming up with new stuff into a bad form of staleness, because every new system they make is not made with the intention of staying, it's made with the expressed intent of being thrown away after the expansion. So instead of innovating for progress, Blizzard has managed to make innovation itself stale.

[Raven]

Becouse players only count new things as content, and if Blizzard did a expansion with only new raids, dungeons and questing and no new features people would go insane and scream that there is no new content.

[DarkAmbient]

A very simple one: Do whatever they can to make things take longer than they need to, whilst occasionally throwing players a bone to make us think they respect our time.

[Doffen]

• Blizzard reinvents the wheel because otherwise the game grows stale.
• They can't just expand upon content and mechanics that players enjoy because otherwise the game grows stale, and if they don't dare to be ingenious we don't get fun stuff like Mythic+.
• Most didn't believe Valor Point was a great system. It was negatively criticized into oblivion. The version we are getting now is just similar to the old VP.
• The process of "just tuning and trying to perfect good system and mechanics" are literally what they always do, you just are part of the playerbase that don't like the current ideas.

You are only remembering the "unpopular" features without counting the popular ones - without innovation and audacity we wouldn't have Arenas, Pet Battles and Transmog.

The game is not unfriendly to alts, you just want two mains.

Agree with Gehco, well put.

I personally love having stuff to do on alts, and SL got content that last the whole expansion for me. There is a lot to cover, sure, but its cosmetic stuff and Covenant helps keeping things fresh for my alts, and not least, my main.

Alt unfriendliness to me is when I log my alts and not find anything to do but the exact same things as my main aka raid and dungeons. With SL there is a lot of flavor coming from the Covenants so its feels fresh everytime I log a new character.

And if you want to just raid and do dungeons, actual power gains in SL is max two hours per week and some torghast until you got your legendaries. Compare that to Legion and BfA.

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Mage towers were overrated. They were ridiculously hard challenges for people decked out in bis gear at launch

Speak for yourself indeed. 897 ilvl, first day of MT. Far from bis gear, and it was incredibly fun to do and complete. It was a expansion only thing, which should be rewarding those who do them. I didn't do the MoP challenge modes. I don't deserve those mogs. Thats how it should be.

[lockybalboa]

Their solution to class design challenges is to just prune the shit out of everything. Simple and effective.

[Doffen]

The success of Classic kinda disagrees with this sentiment.

But if you played classic straight for 16 years that would still be as fun now as 16 years ago?

Perhaps it is the wait that made Classic such a good thing again? I know I didn't intend to play TBC Classic because I did TBC 14 years ago. But now nostalgia is just all over the place and I am really looking forward to it

But if WoW was just TBC the whole way until now I would have said sayonara TBC in latest 2009 lol.

[Razion]

Seems like system successes like Transmog were probably a pretty big component of this. Transmog was really the holy grail that hit it off. It had only a little bit of work to implement as a passion project, and when it was implemented basically overnight it became one of the most popular features the game had. So, one-expansion features that hit big that can stick around forever and have long-term appeal in that way seems like a more valuable prospect to them than just slowly incrementing features that people aren't as excited about. Hype around new expansions seems to be important, and features that help sell the game seem to be a part of that.

Yet since they've worked on these kinds of features there have been a number of them that have hit it off and been successful: Barber Shop, Transmog, Timewalking, Pet Battling, M+, War Mode, Chromie Time, etc. The game wouldn't be the same without these now. For better or worse they seem to have some level of success with their rapid system design. And while it hurts more every expansion when hit with features that don't seem to land, over the course of the game's life span we've gotten more and more relevant features that have stuck around longer. Which isn't to say all these systems are perfect, but I think it's fair to say at the least some have done well enough a handful of times at least.

[melodramocracy]

Ye$, they do.

[A Chozo]

Bold of you to claim this with no proof yet in the same breath tell another user that his experience is not the whole playerbase. You're talking out of your ass as much as anyone else.

Makes this whole thing pointless, doesn't it?

But I'm not claiming that any given % of the playerbase likes or dislikes anything - the burden of proof is on the people who say that "most people liked X". I'm just saying that most people don't because there's no proof that they did.

[Dazlartist]

Ye$, they do.

nailed it!