Current WoW is what you get when you put the players in charge.

[Soon-TM]

This. I don’t see the talent, skill, or passion from this current dev team.

They design WoW very much like a job they hate, and not a passion project

How many of them actually play wow in their free time?

With the "crunch culture" so prevalent in AAA game studios, I very much doubt that those poor sods have any free time at all.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Current WoW is what you get when you put hardcore raiders in charge who design the game to cater to themselves, not towards the rest of the game's actual playerbase.

[justandulas]

With the "crunch culture" so prevalent in AAA game studios, I very much doubt that those poor sods have any free time at all.

That’s a fair point, and I’m sure activision forever putting the squeeze on them hurts the product

But if a game/show/movie etc isn’t being made from a place of passion and love it shows, and SL feels like a corporate spreadsheet designed it and not a group of rpg players making a labor of love

[Edward Wu]

I love how people are still under the delusion that the designers and devs on the WoW team are somehow competent.

They are not. It's always something else with you people. The players. Activision. JAB. Covid. Just looking for boogeymen so you can shift the blame.

[Xires]

Seriously.

There's no real old guard left.

Pretty much everyone on the Dev team now started out as a player.

From Ion to Christie Golden, all of them were and probably still are players of the game.

So every time you say "well the players need to be in charge." They are.

Doesn't mean that I'm super thrilled with the direction of the game (narratively I feel it's far too focused on characters rather than making the world more amazing and letting us discover it.) Just that current Blizz is farmed from the community itself.

As it stands every game studio with someone age 25 to 50 in it has WoW players whether current or former in every single level of development and management.

No. Current WoW is what you get when you have a gaming company that puts out content based off of how long they can keep you sub'd. That push out systems that aren't even complete until the final patch of the xpac. They create problems so that they can push a system on us that is designed to solve the problems that they created.
The "players" are not incharge. The shareholders and Corporate are.
Cataclysm dungeon nerfs are what happens when blizzard listens to the players. You get dungeons that were originally challenging...get nerfed into the ground to the point where they are cake walks. Why did that happen? Because a lot of players that joined up for Wrath (wrath babies) were used to the EASY dungeons that wrath came with. Blizz devs wanted to make dungeons harder like how they were in TBC....but then the playerbase complained about "difficulty". So that ended that.

The WORST dungeon experience was in MoP when all of the dungeons were not only super easy...but the theme was terrible. Worst dungeons ever were in MoP imo.

[korijenkins]

Seriously.

There's no real old guard left.

Pretty much everyone on the Dev team now started out as a player.

From Ion to Christie Golden, all of them were and probably still are players of the game.

So every time you say "well the players need to be in charge." They are.

Doesn't mean that I'm super thrilled with the direction of the game (narratively I feel it's far too focused on characters rather than making the world more amazing and letting us discover it.) Just that current Blizz is farmed from the community itself.

As it stands every game studio with someone age 25 to 50 in it has WoW players whether current or former in every single level of development and management.

Current WoW is what you get when you let suits make executive decisions regarding gameplay and features*

Fixed it for you.

[nvaelz]

Really, if you can't see the correlation between greed(token sales) and the game design you need to take a look around.

[Ninix]

"Current WoW is what you get when you put the players in charge"... It really depends on what type of players you put in charge. Current WoW is what you get when you put a hardcore raider with a hardon for systems and theorycrafting in charge.

I've been out of high-ending content for a few years now, but theorycrafting seems like it has ever been as low as today.

- Simplified talent tree (21 talents vs a panel of 100ish in previous versions)
- disappearence of half the stats and most of the capping mechanism around them (hit, exp, ap, resistance, haste caps,...), even more since they killed reforming
- Harmonization of ressource management (most of specs are built around a trio of HP + useless mana + 1 secondary ressource on a fill & spend)

Complexity of your character management has nothing to do with... optimizing the character... but simply orient your choices in external systems towards a meta-configuration.
No personal customization left. That's not TC.

[T-34]

Current WoW is what you get when you put hardcore raiders in charge who design the game to cater to themselves, not towards the rest of the game's actual playerbase.

Because you have more data on who plays the game and how they play it than Blizzard does?

[Crimson Spears]

Because you have more data on who plays the game and how they play it than Blizzard does?

It seems likely... blizzard at least from a outsiders perspective seems to look at player engagement as a way to judge if they are doing something correctly. This way is inherently flawed as it doesn't show what a player enjoys.

If they made it so asking a guard where the blacksmith trainer was two million times gave you a BiS weapon it would have the highest engagement rate of any content and current blizzard would deem it a success.

You can even tackle your question from other angles. When you see balance changes in bfa that had things reduced by over 50% you can easily argue the players who had the logs warning blizzard...only for them to be ignored had far more accurate data then blizzard did or at least a far more comprehensive understanding of it.

[Farora]

Nah, current Wow is what happens when a soul sucking mega corporation runs a creative project.

[T-34]

It seems likely... blizzard at least from a outsiders perspective seems to look at player engagement as a way to judge if they are doing something correctly. This way is inherently flawed as it doesn't show what a player enjoys.

Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company.
I find it very curious that people think that a company of such size doesn't spend a lot of resources and time on tracking the behaviour of its current clients.
I also find it very curious that people think that a company of such size doesn't use the most up to date knowledge and expertise in order to retain, attract and monetize its potential client-base optimally.

What I find most curious is that some people are unable to comprehend that if they don't like the game as it is or how it evolves, which I can understand, then that doesn't mean that Blizzard is incompetent, it just means that Blizzard is making the game in order to maximize its revenue and thereby its profits.

If someone doesn't like the game and doesn't want to pay for it then that just means that that "someone" isn't a part of Blizzard's core customers anymore.
It is impossible for Blizzard, just as it is for any other company, to make everybody happy.

Edit:
Let me use FF14 as an example, which I personally find to be a game that enforces mediocrity and encourages toxicity and bullying, and therefore I don't want to pay for it.
Using the "enjoyment-logic" then I must consider the game to be bad and being led by incompetent people. Which of course isn't true: FF14 just targets a different audience than WoW.

[Crimson Spears]

Blizzard is a multi-billion dollar company.
I find it very curious that people think that a company of such size doesn't spend a lot of resources and time on tracking the behaviour of its current clients.
I also find it very curious that people think that a company of such size doesn't use the most up to date knowledge and expertise in order to retain, attract and monetize its potential client-base optimally.

What I find most curious is that some people are unable to comprehend that if they don't like the game as it is or how it evolves, which I can understand, then that doesn't mean that Blizzard is incompetent, it just means that Blizzard is making the game in order to maximize its revenue and thereby its profits.

If someone doesn't like the game and doesn't want to pay for it then that just means that that "someone" isn't a part of Blizzard's core customers anymore.
It is impossible for Blizzard, just as it is for any other company, to make everybody happy.

Edit:
Let me use FF14 as an example, which I personally find to be a game that enforces mediocrity and encourages toxicity and bullying, and therefore I don't want to pay for it.
Using the "enjoyment-logic" then I must consider the game to be bad and being led by incompetent people. Which of course isn't true: FF14 just targets a different audience than WoW.

I think what you can't see is a business isn't built to be sustained that puts maximizing profits first and foremost. What we do know is that wow is bleeding subscribers how much and how many exactly is speculation. What we can agree on is the customer decides when enough is enough. So far I enjoy the raiding enough I am willing to tolerate their flight of fancies. That isn't endless of course I skipped most of bfa from its system rot but trying to defend a company using the logic that "well of course they are going to strip mine a product to exhaustion for short term gains" is a weird stance to take for a consumer.

[rrayy]

Blizzard cut a lot of corners with hiring in the past years. Jobs that required continued education can now be obtained without a high school diploma. Developers from prestigious schools are replaced by developers from community colleges.

I do not mean for that to sound condescending but while it all sounded like good business to save money and hire people not seeking higher salaries, you get what you pay for.

This is completely and utterly false. There aren't any jobs that you can get without a high school diploma. Let's stop making stuff up to fit a narrative here.

[T-34]

I think what you can't see is a business isn't built to be sustained that puts maximizing profits first and foremost. What we do know is that wow is bleeding subscribers how much and how many exactly is speculation.

Nobody knows if WoW is "bleeding subscribers". Nobody has any data apart from "feelz" to base that on.
According to the last investor call WoW was the driving force behind Blizzard's increased revenue.
In the same investor call they said there were a particular big influx of new players.

You are extrapolating your own experience/attitude to the game to the overall health of the WoW-business.
That doesn't mean that WoW couldn't be better. I am in no way saying that WoW/Blizzard is being run optimally, but I am saying that is very naive to think that Blizzard isn't spending a lot of time/resources on optimizing the game.

The only thing we know is that WoW seems to be quite profitable for Activision Blizzard and that is the only thing that matters for a publicly listed company.

[rrayy]

I love how people are still under the delusion that the designers and devs on the WoW team are somehow competent.

They are not. It's always something else with you people. The players. Activision. JAB. Covid. Just looking for boogeymen so you can shift the blame.

The real delusion are those who automatically declare the WoW team is incompetent with zero proof because your entire argument is based solely on the fact you do not like what they make and nothing else.

[Lady Atia]

No. Current WoW is what you get when you have a gaming company that puts out content based off of how long they can keep you sub'd. That push out systems that aren't even complete until the final patch of the xpac. They create problems so that they can push a system on us that is designed to solve the problems that they created.
The "players" are not incharge. The shareholders and Corporate are.
Cataclysm dungeon nerfs are what happens when blizzard listens to the players. You get dungeons that were originally challenging...get nerfed into the ground to the point where they are cake walks. Why did that happen? Because a lot of players that joined up for Wrath (wrath babies) were used to the EASY dungeons that wrath came with. Blizz devs wanted to make dungeons harder like how they were in TBC....but then the playerbase complained about "difficulty". So that ended that.

The WORST dungeon experience was in MoP when all of the dungeons were not only super easy...but the theme was terrible. Worst dungeons ever were in MoP imo.

Have you done any CM's? Because they weren't easy lol.

[Crimson Spears]

Nobody knows if WoW is "bleeding subscribers". Nobody has any data apart from "feelz" to base that on.
According to the last investor call WoW was the driving force behind Blizzard's increased revenue.
In the same investor call they said there were a particular big influx of new players.

You are extrapolating your own experience/attitude to the game to the overall health of the WoW-business.
That doesn't mean that WoW couldn't be better. I am in no way saying that WoW/Blizzard is being run optimally, but I am saying that is very naive to think that Blizzard isn't spending a lot of time/resources on optimizing the game.

The only thing we know is that WoW seems to be quite profitable for Activision Blizzard and that is the only thing that matters for a publicly listed company.

Ah your coping I see now... its alright everything ends one day. We know wow is bleeding subs we have accurate enough tools to see that. Careful for simping for mult million dollar companies though at least twitch casters will say your name.

[Drusin]

>Conveniently forgets that Afrasiabi was an everquest player before he came to wow

I would imagine that all of the original vanilla devs were players as well. I don't understand what OP is saying, are there game developers in the world who aren't also gamers? How do they test their products?

- - - Updated - - -

Ah your coping I see now... its alright everything ends one day.

Wow won't end because private servers exist.

We know wow is bleeding subs we have accurate enough tools to see that

So not official data?

[Disxx]

Is that even possible to make everyone happy? From reading here I see that almost everyone wants a different thing. Only where many thoughts match are on the idea that it is Blizzard's fault. For me, I think that we as players have changed. Back at Vanilla, TBC, I thought people were more playing for sake of playing and not just for having the best gear, best rating, best io. But then at WotLK, it felt like everyone wanted the best GS, the best rating, and wanted to get that fast. But I think I have changed as a player. And that Blizzard is trying to satisfy their playerbase.