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

[Queen of Hamsters]

Lol, imagine if it was developed by people that weren't WoW players at least to some extent. It'd be mayhem.

Player behaviour always shaped this game, but it got worse after WoD for some reason. Almost as if they got scared by the results of not listening at all during WoD.

[klogaroth]

Imagine thinking this was a point about any other medium.

Like "these are the books you get when people who read are authors"
"these are the songs you get when people who listen to music are composers and musicians"

You don't want everyone on the team to exclusively play one type of game, same as the best songs and films and books are produced by those with a wide range of knowledge, not just on one genre.

Sure, listening to a song doesn't make you a maestro, but the idea that creators shouldn't also partake in the medium they work in is an absurd one with no merit whatsoever. If you don't have players of video games making video games they will have no knowledge of the shared cultural language of the medium and the developments of their peers.

[shoc]

Warcraft lore is 20+ years old Warhammer fan fiction.

[Littleraven]

There are a variety of factors at play but I think the main issue is them overcomplicating things for no real reason. The current dev team makes these systems and immediately starts trying to find ways to balance them around the top 1% and end up spending way too much time trying to fix them. I can't imagine what their project pipeline must look like there since they are always playing catchup.

I saw a great tweet earlier basically showing the old glyph system and joking about how they were sure glad we had a limit on how many times we could change them. I don't really know when it started but something is just different now. I miss the days when they just made content and didnt make these overcomplicated systems. Something like glyphs just would not exist today because they would find some way to add some artificial limit on it.

[Agent Smith]

But the "old guard" were players as well. How does that fit your theory?

LOL I was about to say this. How does this work exactly? Dumb ass theory OP put together.

Current WoW is what you get when you have tone deaf morons looking to make a profit. Dont kid yourself.

[Zephyrion1602]

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.

You can't be this dense.

This is 100% the result of putting SHAREHOLDER PROFIT as a priority. It has nothing to do with "players" in charge. If players were in charge, loot would be a lot more plentiful. Obviously. WoW has and always will be a skinner box that you put time and money into, and the more of it you do, the happier Bobby Ko-smalldick's friends are. Try harder next time.

[Kralljin]

It's almost as if WoWs millions of players are made up of many different groups who like other things. If you want to keep them all you gotta provide content for every audience.

The difference is that all of those elements still need to feel coherent to each other.

Vanilla was also designed for a broad audience but it didn't compromise on its RPG elements solely for the sake of attracting a given audience.
Prime example here is M+ & Arena, those extremely competitive elements simply do not mix very well with an RPG heavy approach.
In the same vein, it also didn't make everything accessible for everybody, because it knew that a modicum of exclusivity and prestige can add a lot to a game.
Designing specific content for a specific audience results in a superior experience for that audience, rather than compromise it to make it more accessible for everybody at the expense of quality.

Attempting to please everybody will result in pleasing nobody, thus it's better to stick to a certain vision and fulfill that as best as possible, which can attract a broad audience, rather than trying to lure in every audience in with something they prefer and only deliver halfassed on it.

The article you linked is about the game being pay 2 win and even plays with the idea of RMT Seaver’s it has nothing to do with cosmetic MTX and given that they already had some with the trading card game in 2006-7 there’s no reason to think they would be against more and that they were forced to have a cash shop after the merger.

Not really, it's just an example given, it doesn't say "oh well, cosmetics are fine", the term "item" can mean a lot of things, a toy (before the toy tab existed) was also an item, despite being clearly cosmetic.

Putting aside that "Real money Transaction" as a term is also pretty general, buying a mount from the store is as much of a RMT as buying gold from a 3rd party website, in both instances you acquire something within the game for real money, except one is allowed under the ToS and the other isn't.
Blizzard simply refers to RMT when they only talk about stuff that is against the ToS, but the term in itself is neutral.

The TCG is also a convenient excuse in that aspect because it still was its own game at the end of the day.
The idea it actually was a super clever strategy to have MTX in the game without anyone noticing also falls apart because Blizzard discontinued the whole thing, which by the way, happened shortly after they announced Hearthstone, which is the TCG's spiritual successor.

If it truly was just intended as an easy cashgrab, i do not believe Blizzard would have stopped printing card.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

The TCG is also a convenient excuse in that aspect because it still was its own game at the end of the day.
The idea it actually was a super clever strategy to have MTX in the game without anyone noticing also falls apart because Blizzard discontinued the whole thing, which by the way, happened shortly after they announced Hearthstone, which is the TCG's spiritual successor.

If it truly was just intended as an easy cashgrab, i do not believe Blizzard would have stopped printing card.

them discontinuing it just points more so to be being a cash grab. while the physical card market didn't go any where blizzard also wasn't making full profit off of the card came as they didn't run it them self's. by limiting Warcraft based card games to just hearthstone they make it so they get the full profit unlike licensing wow out to another company and only getting royalty's.

they pretty much ended the card game so they could grab even more cash from doing the same thing in a digital formant and earn a ton more with no threat that people who prefer physical play wouldn't be giving all of there money to blizzard.

[ActuaryBro]

Wow devs haven't listened to the pvp community for years

[D3athsting]

Metzen was/is a hardcore rp'er, ion a hardcore raider, that's it

[thedingleberry]

Metzen was/is a hardcore rp'er, ion a hardcore raider, that's it

Odd because i feel like they destroyed raiding by making M+ a requirement by giving it mythic raid level gear in vault. I can't be competitive as a raider unless i get my 226 gear from M+... And I feel underpowered in my heroic raiding guild because i don't do +14-15 M+ clears so most of my guildies are doing way more damage due to their 226 set compared to my 217 set. I'm not saying I need a higher ilvl to clear heroic raid. I'm just saying half the fun of raiding was battling your guildies on DPS, and i'm always around the bottom, which makes raiding really not fun...

M+ has its place for people that like to do it, but it really shouldn't reward you stuff you can use in raid because it then becomes a requirement to be competitive in raid.

[Icelin]

WoW has and always will be a skinner box that you put time and money into, and the more of it you do, the happier Bobby Ko-smalldick's friends are. Try harder next time.

I don't see very many people playing or looking at the new products. They should be the ones trying harder.

Wow devs haven't listened to the pvp community for years

One outcry that has been neglected longer than systems. Add in over four years? Of complaining about systems. That promote player gap (to extremist measures) and discourages players from participating in end game content. Including mass exodus on BFA social media outlets complaints, including articles.

I think they don't listen to the majority at all.

[unbound]

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.

Sorry, but that is not the primary problem with the game.

The game is content starved, and that is entirely on the management. They've been increasing the starving of WoW since Wrath in the name of increased profits. They don't want to put in any substantial improvements or substantial content because it would go against those profits.

WoW has been considered a cash cow since Wrath and continues to be viewed as such today (notice that despite decreasing MAUs, they keep making increasing profits).

Profits first is *why* the world isn't more amazing to let us discover it...it would cost more money, and they are literally making calculations to determine just how little content they can provide and still keep sufficient subscribers in the game spending on micro-transactions.

[Nnyco]

You do realise that the "old guard" was also majority of players? Oh right, you left that out because that would not put your point across... riiiiiight i forgot silly me.

[Malkiah]

Old WoW was built off past EQ players, right... is that really any different?

very specifically, it was built using input from EQ players who were ragingly butt hurt that the current EQ expansion at the time was too difficult - that is where a lot of WoW's design philosophy was created, for it to be the more accessible and easier version of a game that these people could feel superior within.
(amusing sidenote: you can really see the EQ influence in some of the earlier quests that were designed by Furor, who created the Thunderfury quest chain for example)

i've always felt that this core paradigm in how WoW was developed as a game is also what eventually crippled it, because it caused an aversion to what you could call "investment systems", which i guess are the opposite of "borrowed power" - there's no system for character power progression in WoW outside of ilevel, and every new batch of content completely invalidates everything that came before it.
i've always seen this as a reaction to EQ's AA system, which is... basically imagine the system of legendary powers from legion, except it went on for 15 years and there were 20,000 points worth of things to buy. also in EQ, there are items highly prized and in use to this day that were released in the 2nd expansion, 21 years ago.

anyways IMO two things happened that have lead to the current state of WoW being rather cookie cutter:
1. they never had a plan for long term investment, ie: a way to progress your character that isn't tied to ilevel.
2. near the end of WOTLK was the first time in WoW's history that a majority of the people playing the game were max level (prior to that tail end of WOTLK a numerical majority of players were still leveling) and they were completely unprepared for what that meant from a design standpoint in terms of making content for the majority of their playerbase.

when you put the two of those together you get current WoW: a system with no planned function aside from chasing ilevel, and so all design and content is nothing more than replacing the entirety of what came directly before it with a new set of gear.

[Kralljin]

they pretty much ended the card game so they could grab even more cash from doing the same thing in a digital formant and earn a ton more with no threat that people who prefer physical play wouldn't be giving all of there money to blizzard.

Except they don't churn out the same rate of items onto the shop as they did with the TCG, nor moved any of those items onto the shop, which would have been the logical consequence.

Putting aside that the TCG and Hearthstone aren't exact matches, Hearthstone is not exactly "just" a digital version of the TCG.

And especially under the light of the fact that Hearthstone lacks the cross promotion aspect, you don't get anything in WoW for playing HS outside of a single mount, which you can get for free.
That might be true if certain rare cards also unlocked items in WoW, but they don't.

[arkanon]

Sadly none of this matters. I suspect subs are at an all-time low as of Yesturday. Andnas of today, the sub count will go back up as the tbcc prepatch launches, and the devs can sit back, wipe the sweat off their brow, and say "phew, that was close, I thought for a moment there that we would have to make some dramatic changes to SL, I honestly started to think it might be US who were wrong, but no, it's the players who are wrong, and they are all back now so problem solved".
But Mr dev, I think they are subbed for classic TBC??? "All one sub kiddo, problem solved!!!"
But if none of them actually play SL....
"Problem.....solved....."

[Kralljin]

Sadly none of this matters. I suspect subs are at an all-time low as of Yesturday. Andnas of today, the sub count will go back up as the tbcc prepatch launches, and the devs can sit back, wipe the sweat off their brow, and say "phew, that was close, I thought for a moment there that we would have to make some dramatic changes to SL, I honestly started to think it might be US who were wrong, but no, it's the players who are wrong, and they are all back now so problem solved".
But Mr dev, I think they are subbed for classic TBC??? "All one sub kiddo, problem solved!!!"
But if none of them actually play SL....
"Problem.....solved....."

Mate, they still have four years until Classic Wotlk is over, plenty of time to solve those issues.

[exsanguinate]

anyone who says the game is better today or even worse the same as back then is either completely stupid or just has a loss of reality. modern wow is far away from a "good" game with quality.

[GreenJesus]

People acting like "the old guard" only did it for the fun and goodwill. For the players and such.

Completly ignoring, that THAT old guard is directly responsible for everything wie complain about today. The merger with Activision, streamlining of content, MTX ingame.

The whole concept of WOW was from the start to get as much money out of the player as possible. 15€ back then was quite the steep asking price. Don't act as if wow was some sort of angel at the start onyl concerned with the wellbeing of players.

You get the same threads now like we got since classic.

Yeh honestly $15 a month back then (and still today is pretty expensive). Luckily the whales buy tokens so I can sell my raid BoE's and fund my sub for the rest of the tier.