Have We Become Overly Critical?

[arkanon]

Lol WoW’s shoddy design is “polished”? Good joke.

Didnt you just accuse me of "dodging" the conversation? Do you not understand this discussion, or are you simply avoiding it?

The only examples you have tried to give have absolutely nothing to do with a lack of polish, but rather subjective opinions, things you dont like. What you are confusing are gameplay elements that are implemented very well, Like PvP - you have random bgs, rated bgs, arenas, rankings, ratings, rewards and titles. These systems are all easily accessible, and for the most part, work very well.

Honestly, I just think the topic of the conversation is getting muddled for you, and you are confusing "things I dont like about wow" with "poorly designed and implemented systems that don't work as they should, and often dont work at all". One is a subjective opinion akin to "I dont like the music in wow" - and the other is a lack of polish.

[Advent]

I still disagree that WoW is by far the most polished. PvP is laughably bad, with pillar humping and stupid abilities. They ruined old dungeons with Cata mini-games. Their lore is full of retcons. I could go on. How is that “polished”?

I don't think that's what polish is when it comes to games. Polish, in my view, are a set of objective standards that make the game experience simple to navigate and understand. Or small things that demonstrate good attention to detail. Things like an intuitive or easy to use menu system, server stability, good physics and movement, well-explained abilities and enemy design. When it is firing on all cylinders, WoW has those things in spades.

[NineSpine]

Didnt you just accuse me of "dodging" the conversation? Do you not understand this discussion, or are you simply avoiding it?

The only examples you have tried to give have absolutely nothing to do with a lack of polish, but rather subjective opinions, things you dont like. What you are confusing are gameplay elements that are implemented very well, Like PvP - you have random bgs, rated bgs, arenas, rankings, ratings, rewards and titles. These systems are all easily accessible, and for the most part, work very well.

Honestly, I just think the topic of the conversation is getting muddled for you, and you are confusing "things I dont like about wow" with "poorly designed and implemented systems that don't work as they should, and often dont work at all". One is a subjective opinion akin to "I dont like the music in wow" - and the other is a lack of polish.

Wow really doesn’t have the polish it used to, especially in its systems design. The systems feel amateur, cobbled together. The covenant halls mostly feel like random rooms with unrelated features just placed in there. Even some other aspects are slipping. Look at the interface for the mission table in SL. It’s embarrassing, like a cheesy mobile game. The capital cities are clusterfucks, a dumping ground of defunct currency vendors strewn about with no organization whatsoever. There are portals everywhere and it feels lazy. I mean even the interface has been outsourced to the community with the original one barely receiving any updates since launch.

Chromie time and how it interacts with scaling is probably the worst offender, a really clunky mess. You can have a character who is twenty levels lower than you but the content scales so that it is is easier for them than it is for you. Honestly, even scaling in general feels weird and unpolished, with noticeable losses in power when levels are gained at certain points.

Encounters still feel polished. Most of the level design is still very good, although it has gotten incredibly cramped but that isn’t a polish issue.

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I don't think that's what polish is when it comes to games. Polish, in my view, are a set of objective standards that make the game experience simple to navigate and understand. Or small things that demonstrate good attention to detail. Things like an intuitive or easy to use menu system, server stability, good physics and movement, well-explained abilities and enemy design. When it is firing on all cylinders, WoW has those things in spades.

Wow is one of the most absurdly obtuse games on the market. When SL came out my wife wanted to get into the game with me and some of our friends. Within an hour she was completely overwhelmed with about ten different abilities, some of which had interactions with other abilities that weren’t clear at all. There was no time to use an ability, gain an understanding of it, and move forward, because before that could happen she had already leveled and gotten more abilities.

She’s not some game newbie. She plays tons of games, mostly open world RPGs like Fallout. She lasted about two hours before she said wow felt like homework and she felt like she was staring at menus and ability bars instead of the game and that frustrated her. She compared it to playing a video game for the first time but not knowing that cheat codes were on which were causing you to level incredibly fast and unlock all the abilities right away.

I think it’s really easy for a long time player to underestimate how awful the new player experience is.

[Metrox]

I believe that I have become overly critical and your comments made me wonder why. I think it boils down to The Same Problems Recurring in Expansions.

Things like the World Boss Lag in whatever zone it is being attacked. Wintergrasp back in Wrath was the first that I remember being frame stopping bad. Take that forward to Nazjatar in BFA. We complained all over every forum in every site. SL and it is still happening. No fix in sight.

Borrowed powers that they promise will end. Next expansion we are at it again with Covenents and its ensuing problems. These are nothing compared to Corruption but we are still drinking the Kool aide.

These types of problems that just keep coming back have made me get overly annoyed at things that probably would not have made much of a blip on my radar a decade ago. Blizzard just doesn't fix things that could/should be taken care of in some manner. I don't care if Worgen have new eye color or Void Elves get nose rings. Just fix the lag in world boss zones......stop the disconnects and world crashes.....stop the problems that are coding and hardware problems on Blizzard's end. Quit nerfing specs down.... try bringing others up! Ion strangled loot drops and now has to buff it back up. Any player with his history of WoW experience could see it coming.

See.....now I am in an overly critical mode. Just thinking and writing it all down makes me that way. Time to go watch anime and eat pie...... LOL.

Stay safe and have fun.

[ippollite]

Totally agree. I remember Tali watching his brother get super frustrated by Exile's reach (things like using items from backpacks etc). Stuff every player takes for granted. I always wondered how he might have found queueing for his first actual dungeon and ending up in freehold. So i did an experiment as a non-healer to check it out (as a healer).

It's... doable. But then again, ive spent 15 years eyeballing an aggro radius, im not keyboard turning, im using hotkeys, i understand LOS, and i know where my mounts are located (oh, and i have them). Even with that, and arguably on the most capable reactive healer in the early game (holy priest), its still pretty tense. Which is fun. But perhaps a gigantic jump in difficulty from 'go kill 10 of these rabbits' you get in the world.

Then we come to that flood of spells as you turbo speed through the levels. Imagine having to learn absolutely everything about your class in the course of two expansions (and pre-patch SL it was just the one)? Imagine getting thirty or so spells you need to have on your (likely) default hotbar settings and having no real time to utilise about 60-70% of them in such a short, swift level experience. It must be incredibly overwhelming. It so puzzles me that they went out of their way to do all this work to streamline the game to bring in new players, yet did almost nothing about pace and potentially overloading players. Like, even just simple things: AOE taunts/heals for the DESIGNED multimob pulls with splash damage. Wasnt there a boss (in pre patch) that was literally unkillable in Legion (was it?) because you couldnt heal through the dot tick? Theres so many 'this'll do, right?' design decisions in SLs (and i really want to blame it on corona), but it feels like, as you say, a lack of polish (and understanding of how the systems feed into one another - which by rights, you'd assume them to be the absolute masters of).

[BetrayedOf52]

Totally agree. I remember Tali watching his brother get super frustrated by Exile's reach (things like using items from backpacks etc). Stuff every player takes for granted. I always wondered how he might have found queueing for his first actual dungeon and ending up in freehold. So i did an experiment as a non-healer to check it out (as a healer).

It's... doable. But then again, ive spent 15 years eyeballing an aggro radius, im not keyboard turning, im using hotkeys, i understand LOS, and i know where my mounts are located (oh, and i have them). Even with that, and arguably on the most capable reactive healer in the early game (holy priest), its still pretty tense. Which is fun. But perhaps a gigantic jump in difficulty from 'go kill 10 of these rabbits' you get in the world.

Then we come to that flood of spells as you turbo speed through the levels. Imagine having to learn absolutely everything about your class in the course of two expansions (and pre-patch SL it was just the one)? Imagine getting thirty or so spells you need to have on your (likely) default hotbar settings and having no real time to utilise about 60-70% of them in such a short, swift level experience. It must be incredibly overwhelming. It so puzzles me that they went out of their way to do all this work to streamline the game to bring in new players, yet did almost nothing about pace and potentially overloading players. Like, even just simple things: AOE taunts/heals for the DESIGNED multimob pulls with splash damage. Wasnt there a boss (in pre patch) that was literally unkillable in Legion (was it?) because you couldnt heal through the dot tick? Theres so many 'this'll do, right?' design decisions in SLs (and i really want to blame it on corona), but it feels like, as you say, a lack of polish (and understanding of how the systems feed into one another - which by rights, you'd assume them to be the absolute masters of).

well said, this is exactly it

[sil3ntearth]

Wow really doesn’t have the polish it used to, especially in its systems design. The systems feel amateur, cobbled together. The covenant halls mostly feel like random rooms with unrelated features just placed in there. Even some other aspects are slipping. Look at the interface for the mission table in SL. It’s embarrassing, like a cheesy mobile game. The capital cities are clusterfucks, a dumping ground of defunct currency vendors strewn about with no organization whatsoever. There are portals everywhere and it feels lazy. I mean even the interface has been outsourced to the community with the original one barely receiving any updates since launch.

Chromie time and how it interacts with scaling is probably the worst offender, a really clunky mess. You can have a character who is twenty levels lower than you but the content scales so that it is is easier for them than it is for you. Honestly, even scaling in general feels weird and unpolished, with noticeable losses in power when levels are gained at certain points.

Encounters still feel polished. Most of the level design is still very good, although it has gotten incredibly cramped but that isn’t a polish issue.

- - - Updated - - -



Wow is one of the most absurdly obtuse games on the market. When SL came out my wife wanted to get into the game with me and some of our friends. Within an hour she was completely overwhelmed with about ten different abilities, some of which had interactions with other abilities that weren’t clear at all. There was no time to use an ability, gain an understanding of it, and move forward, because before that could happen she had already leveled and gotten more abilities.

She’s not some game newbie. She plays tons of games, mostly open world RPGs like Fallout. She lasted about two hours before she said wow felt like homework and she felt like she was staring at menus and ability bars instead of the game and that frustrated her. She compared it to playing a video game for the first time but not knowing that cheat codes were on which were causing you to level incredibly fast and unlock all the abilities right away.

I think it’s really easy for a long time player to underestimate how awful the new player experience is.

Interesting, my friend that just started found it to be very easy and far better than it was when he tried to play it last, but he's played games like FFXIV. He had the same experience your wife had in the past. My sister, who also tried playing in the past but hated it also had a great experience with the SL leveling, but she's a SWTOR veteran.

I'd say the learning curve difference is between heavily pathed games like fallout compared to games like WoW/FFXIV. SWTOR is far more like a single player RPG but still requires knowledge of how abilities chain/work together. I would think anyone dropped into a game like the above mentioned would struggle for a while.

I agree though, the chromie thing isn't intuitive at all...and the mission table is trash.

[FossilFree]

Maybe it's not that we have become overly critical, but that the devs are making more decisions worth criticizing?

[Caerrona]

Wow really doesn’t have the polish it used to, especially in its systems design. The systems feel amateur, cobbled together. The covenant halls mostly feel like random rooms with unrelated features just placed in there. Even some other aspects are slipping. Look at the interface for the mission table in SL. It’s embarrassing, like a cheesy mobile game. The capital cities are clusterfucks, a dumping ground of defunct currency vendors strewn about with no organization whatsoever. There are portals everywhere and it feels lazy. I mean even the interface has been outsourced to the community with the original one barely receiving any updates since launch.

Chromie time and how it interacts with scaling is probably the worst offender, a really clunky mess. You can have a character who is twenty levels lower than you but the content scales so that it is is easier for them than it is for you. Honestly, even scaling in general feels weird and unpolished, with noticeable losses in power when levels are gained at certain points.

Encounters still feel polished. Most of the level design is still very good, although it has gotten incredibly cramped but that isn’t a polish issue.

- - - Updated - - -



Wow is one of the most absurdly obtuse games on the market. When SL came out my wife wanted to get into the game with me and some of our friends. Within an hour she was completely overwhelmed with about ten different abilities, some of which had interactions with other abilities that weren’t clear at all. There was no time to use an ability, gain an understanding of it, and move forward, because before that could happen she had already leveled and gotten more abilities.

She’s not some game newbie. She plays tons of games, mostly open world RPGs like Fallout. She lasted about two hours before she said wow felt like homework and she felt like she was staring at menus and ability bars instead of the game and that frustrated her. She compared it to playing a video game for the first time but not knowing that cheat codes were on which were causing you to level incredibly fast and unlock all the abilities right away.

I think it’s really easy for a long time player to underestimate how awful the new player experience is.

Your wife can't even grasp "use this ability to generate" and "use this ability to spend"?

My condolences...

[OMGTwitchTV]

Who is we? I don't set myself up to be disappointed about anything game devs do anymore.

We: Blizzard gamers. I too choose not to allow the devs decisions to alter my enjoyment of the game. If I do find myself disappointed, I simply unsub until something strikes my interest enough to bring me back. It's how I missed most of BFA, but have not missed a single day of Shadowlands.

[Samuraijake]

they'll add flying and ppl will complain flight speed is too slow...

they'll boost flight speed and ppl will complain the cast time to get on your flying mount is too slow..

They'll make it instant cast and ppl will complain that Thrall's skin is too green

[Swnem]

I believe that I have become overly critical and your comments made me wonder why. I think it boils down to The Same Problems Recurring in Expansions.

Things like the World Boss Lag in whatever zone it is being attacked. Wintergrasp back in Wrath was the first that I remember being frame stopping bad. Take that forward to Nazjatar in BFA. We complained all over every forum in every site. SL and it is still happening. No fix in sight.

Borrowed powers that they promise will end. Next expansion we are at it again with Covenents and its ensuing problems. These are nothing compared to Corruption but we are still drinking the Kool aide.

These types of problems that just keep coming back have made me get overly annoyed at things that probably would not have made much of a blip on my radar a decade ago. Blizzard just doesn't fix things that could/should be taken care of in some manner. I don't care if Worgen have new eye color or Void Elves get nose rings. Just fix the lag in world boss zones......stop the disconnects and world crashes.....stop the problems that are coding and hardware problems on Blizzard's end. Quit nerfing specs down.... try bringing others up! Ion strangled loot drops and now has to buff it back up. Any player with his history of WoW experience could see it coming.

See.....now I am in an overly critical mode. Just thinking and writing it all down makes me that way. Time to go watch anime and eat pie...... LOL.

Stay safe and have fun.

Problem with the buff aproach is that you nerf the whole game when you do that.

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they'll add flying and ppl will complain flight speed is too slow...

they'll boost flight speed and ppl will complain the cast time to get on your flying mount is too slow..

They'll make it instant cast and ppl will complain that Thrall's skin is too green

That is ridiculous. Quality of life changes are a good thing.
Actually, you just made all that up, cause i don't remember anyone ever bringing those issues up or them gaining traction.

Instant mounting would be sweet though. Heck i'd be happy with casting it on the move like in swtor. ^^
You got some good complaints.

[WowIsDead64]

It's no secret who supports Blizz and who crucifies them with every, single decision; however, I have to wonder...

have we become overcritical of a 15 year old MMO that continues to get updates? Ultima Online, EverQuest and World of Warcraft have been around for a long while and still have a large and dedicated fanbase, yet other MMOs like Aion, LotRO, Warhammer, Age of Conan, and even Guild Wars 2 all set out to dethrone the long standing favorites and eventually faded into nothingness. What do you suppose prevents some players from just being excited to still have new content and millions of other players?

Unfortunately long term survival of game doesn't come for free. Blizzard have to focus only on content, that keeps players active and subbed. They have become paranoid about fun in this game, treat it as some sort of cheating, that devalues their content and therefore no longer create content just for fun. For example allied races weren't created just because having more character customizations was fun. They were created to enforce rep grinds on players.

[Wangming]

In short, people like what they like. No single MMORPG is a perfect creation. Not even Classic WoW, no matter how passionate some feel about it.

For probably the first time. I totally agree with you. Glad we could find some common ground.

[Lolites]

Hit is no longer a stat.
Every criticism is a hit, these days.

nah, more misses than ever before, open any thread here and its 99% swing and miss by mile... perhaps simply bcs more people try to hit

[username993720]

nah, more misses than ever before, open any thread here and its 99% swing and miss by mile... perhaps simply bcs more people try to hit

I guess Blizzard stacked on the Dodge stat

[wargone]

Kind of i will agree.
But i think it as much also a change of culture.
But it not just that, reviewing and commenting online is more common. And it not a major hazzel to just on a random youtube video / reddit thread / mmo champion what have you and so on Just to write "LOL IT BAD " it takes no afford, and people like to partake in circle jerking of hate.

The amount of times i seen people " I HAVE NOT PLAYED in 4 Years" yet still stick around to hate.
the fact Asmonggold was such a popular wow streamers, but he had one of the most toxic wow communitys, and all he did was spew hate and anger about a game he clearly did not like anymore. yet he stuck around for so long.
that is where i have a problem, Some people just like to hate to hate, and to critcize while haveing no insight.

[Lolites]

I guess Blizzard stacked on the Dodge stat

it seems more like some people are hitting air and blizzard stands behind them thinking "what the fuck is this guy doing?"... or actualy paying them no mind

[Fixxit the Gnome]

There's definitely a subset of the community that's overtly critical, bordering at the nonsensical.

Just being critical does not really help the devs in any way, shape or form.
To give good feedback you need to understand the intent of the design, and explain how it succeeds and fails in that regard. Proposing an alternative can be good also.

Just saying stuff is boring or bad without qualifications does nothing.

Like, from a pedagogical standpoint, all criticisms are not good criticism. One have to give good feedback that the other person can use to improve.

That being said, WoW being criticized is good for the game in the long run, but when the feedback the devs get seems like nagging it doesn't really do anything. Blizz have said in the past that it's sometimes hard to separate between legimate feedback and grievances/whining, especially from people that's not actually playing the game.

edit: I'm not pushing whatever problems the game have under the rug (The BFA systems overload, anyone?), I simply want a more healthy discourse regarding the state of the game.

There's also alot more content creators that talk about WoW and it follows that issues experienced by some of the community can be exaggerated or narrativized in such a way to seem like a big problem. Like it seems that some problems are way more dire than they actually are.

[Nyel]

[...]

Artifact Weapons were just the Path of the Titans feature that people begged blizz to finally implement for ages. Now the community's pulled a 180 and considers it horrible.

I can see why the dev's don't feel terribly ambitious. They have over a decade of data of the community never being happy with anything that isn't BG's and Raids, with even mythic+ a mode to make dungeons slightly more relevant, getting the community all worked up too. Why put any effort into a new feature that the community's just going to hate on.

[...]

I disagree here. The community considers them as horrible because it resets every expansion. If this would be a feature they build up upon throughout expansions, it would be received way better. But there is really no greater sense of having artifact weapons for one expansion, Heart of Azeroth for the next and then Covenants when all of it is basically the same system. They would save a ton of work and do themselves a favor if they designed one system (aka talents for example) that they can carry on throughout every expansion.

All what Blizzard is doing in the last years is reiterating on previous concepts and making them often worse not better. This gets old very quick and is one of the reasons why their game design doesn't really work anymore. It excites you for 1-2 months and then you're just bored and done with it - this shouldn't be the case.