While you indeed are free to do what you want with your business it's prudent to try to do what your customers want, assuming you want customers.
If I have a restaurant it's well within my rights to only use disgusting ingredients, however it would not be wise to do so.
Last edited by Hyrja; 2021-10-24 at 09:08 AM.
What's really important to keep in mind is, that you have absolutely no clue how sampling works.
People keep parroting the same "vocal minority" bullshit, that's why we had the Covenants and other things the way they are for more than a year. Since beta a lot of people saw the flaws and pointed them out, but were quickly branded as a "vocal minority, here on MMOChamp/other forums" by apologists, such as yourself. Guess what?! People left the game en masse, which forced Blizzard to pull the infamous "ripcord", thus admitting that the "vocal minority" were, in fact, not a minority at all.
That's why we can't have nice things, if Blizzard serves you a shit on a platter, you'd be the first to jump in and start explaining how that's not a problem, because the "people on MMOC", who are not liking it, are a laughable minority of the player base.
I mean, it is a fact that people on forums tend to be way more invested but represent a smaller part of the auience, even more so today where forums in this style have become practically a vestige of the past. Dismissing the opinions and preferences of a smaller subsection of your audience is also absolutely a legit business strategy. That being said, it's important to know what actually differentiates the invested people and their impression of the game from the silent nameless mooks in your general audience.
If "we" clamored that we have not enough ultra hardcore raids and the game should only provide such raids and nothing else besides, then it's obvious "our" opinion is not relevant, since not even 40% of the playerbase participate in raiding, let alone high end raiding. But that is not the case here. Therefore I agree that the argument of dismissing forums as such makes no sense when it relates to basic parts of the gameplay loop thart will effect everyone negatively. Especially since WoW is heavily driven by the upper echelons of the playerbase, even the people that couldn't be any further from it than they already are.
Covenants were a major annoyance for people that engage with WoW mostly on a mechanical level, which is a playerbase that Blizzard frankly has cultivated over the years. But it is far from the only thing that drives people away. The story in writing, pacing and presentation being rubbish is another issue, as is the general lack of content to do and it not even being good. So even the non-mechanical players aren't engaged in your game and its world. Anyone can realize that, even people on forums, unless they are huffing Blizzard's farts of course.
Last edited by Cosmic Janitor; 2021-10-24 at 09:39 AM.
You are welcome, Metzen. I hope you won't fuck up my underground expansion idea.
I'm pretty sure woke America hates China though. So this isn't to appease China, but instead to appease their 18th century ancestors that dressed up as priests during the day and went witch-hunting, and fucked prostitutes during the night.
- - - Updated - - -
Yeah pretty much, also the devs of FFXIV aren't abusers and still managed to put that stuff in and no one got hurt.
Sad that your post seems so entitled that it takes away from the actual problem which is:
So this dev enjoys that, yet they remove every mention of sex or innuendo in WoW. What's the point? Who are they protecting?and frankly I'm disappointed in myself for only learning recently just how amazing Gillian Anderson talking about sex with a British accent really is.
One could say that leaving dudebro jokes in the game made by people who consantly, year after year sexually harrassed people working for them are disgusting ingridients.
Personally i couldnt give less of a shit, none of the changes affect me at all. I find the fact that people get upset baffling. Don't think i would have noticed a single one without datamining.
Last edited by Cthulhu fhtagn; 2021-10-24 at 11:00 AM.
You think "sampling" from a forum is representative? My god.
I know people in vocal minorities gets triggered when people point out they're a minority, but this shit right here is just absolutely hilarious.
People get so cocky when they think they've influenced Blizzard in any way, just look at this Undedo guy. It's so fucking pathetic that people try to bend facts to fit their agenda and make claims that they, and everyone else, knows are bullshit - and of course they never back up those claims.
This game, and any other game is better off without people like you in the community. Please, git.
Hi
And that's the problem, isn't it? For all we know, a lot of the stuff being removed is just "collateral damage" from people taking this opportunity to just remove everything "offensive" and likely change this game's rating from a 'T' to 'EC'...
- - - Updated - - -
That's the problem, though: assumption.
Neither do I. But what about things that are completely innocuous, such as the "Maximillian of Northshire" quest in Un'Goro being changed? Also, Afrasiabi was just an associate quest designer in the early days of WoW. Hell, he joined in 2004, roughly half a year before WoW launched. I honestly doubt he had any say in the jokes and flirts of the original races.Hell, there's like a dozen characters named some variant of Afrasiabi or Kariel in the game. He dropped references to himself and his EQ characters all over the goddamn place. I don't have a problem with all that stuff being gutted.
Look at the list of removed jokes/flirts and tell me if even most of them deserve to be removed.Though from what I've seen, that's really not what Blizzard is aiming this "cleanup" at. They're mainly ditching overt references to developers and ditching some sexualized emotes that I suppose could be used to harass other players.
The cynical side of me wants to say "give them time". Also, the "/em" command is not voice acted.And FWIW, it's not like they're removing /em.
"Torturing someone is not an evil thing to do if it is done for good reasons" by Varodoc
"You sit in OG/SW waiting on a Mythic+ queue" by Altmer <- Oh, the pearls in this forum...
"They sort of did this Dragonriding, which ushered in the Dracthyr race." by Teriz <- the BS some people reach for their narratives...
Its not just "WoW devs". Most game developers, celebrities, etc are out of touch with their player base and regular folk in general. They are all so caught up and stuck in their little bubble. No idea who called for more open world games, but publishers and studios think gamers want bigger and bigger game worlds, more games as a service when its proven time and time again how quickly they flop or fail to hold a size able player base.
Blizzard themselves are disproving you, by "pulling the ripcord" and adding in 9.1 all the QoL changes that people(on this forum included) asked since Shadowlands Beta. I had the very same discussion with another poster literally days before they announced 9.1.5, him trying to tell me that the Covenants(and everything else) is fine as they are and it's only the "vocal minority" on MMO-Champ that is whining about it. Look how did that turn out.
And if you think that sampling from a forum is not representative, you are absolutely clueless. If we get numerous thread with polls about which the people consider the worst expansion and every single time WoD wins by a landslide, I can promise you that this sample is a good enough representative of what the overall player base consider as worst expansion as well. Period.
Explaining the matter any further is a waste of time, as you clearly don't have the capacity to understand what is being talked about here. Or in the worse case - you understand, but blindly defend Blizzard, ready to swallow anything that they direct to your mouth, no matter if they are in the right or wrong.
That's an...extremely twisted way of interpreting that.
It sounds like "well the corporate overlords are not listening to us. These changes aren't meant to distract from that by any means, or they'd be promoted as such, they're just what we want to change about the game as developers."
Granted I disagree with the changes, which seem to have a sweeping perspective of "anything even remotely construable as innuendo is no longer appropriate for this T for Teen rated video game" but it seems clear to me what the motive of the changes is, and it sure as hell isn't what you're going with.
I don't disagree with you but that's really true of all things on the internet. Even something massively popular like Twitter is a poor sample because 92% of all tweets come from just 10% of the users. There's not a clearer definition of an echo chamber in all of existence. Yet we constantly see different creators use Twitter as a metric to gauge public opinion.
We've seen Blizzard send out a measly amount of surveys to try to measure the playerbase's opinion, but beyond that they seem to put in no real effort to figure out what makes their customers happy. And for such a large publisher that's just wild to me.
Last edited by Khaza-R; 2021-10-24 at 03:23 PM.
I might be a bit confused about what's going on exactly. I don't really follow Blizzard or it's nonsense these days much. However, there is no such thing as a "rogue" development team. WoW is the in condition it is in today due to cooperate decisions, and Blizzard as company being a multi franchised, diversified, mega corp.
Developers, in a real sense, have very little to do with what happens in WoW. Developers simply follow orders like any other peon (yesh me lord...) at his or her job. This has been increased and amplified over the years by the extreme corporatization of the development industry to the degree where they are simply order takers. The days of free thinking, somewhat unrestricted, developer 'heroes' are long, long, very, very, long gone. All these types of posts are largely pointless other than to scratch an itch caused by boredom. At the end of the day, WoW will be whatever the bean counters want it to be, regardless of whatever the player base, or developers have to say.
That's the thing. There are people that think you shouldn't have the right to use the ingredients you want while making things in your restaurant simply because they don't want you to use them regardless.
Those people have a hard time understanding that businesses aren't sentient beings and have convinced themselves that their own self interest is somehow morally superior to everyone and everything else regarding those businesses. They claim they want those companies to be and do better, yet their actions show clearly they want those companies to cease existing all together.
I really can’t say I see a problem or need to over obsess “collateral damage” or assumes that they would be trying to turn from T to E.
If the devs say the changes are to take out the left overs from people like Alex and co I really have no reason to doubt them.
- - - Updated - - -
Given that the devs haven’t removed every mention of sex in wow (see the new gigolo’s) and tweets like the one linked one can infer that maybe the problem isn’t sex being mentioned but having abusers in the work place putting it in game while still abusing people.
All I ever wanted was the truth. Remember those words as you read the ones that follow. I never set out to topple my father's kingdom of lies from a sense of misplaced pride. I never wanted to bleed the species to its marrow, reaving half the galaxy clean of human life in this bitter crusade. I never desired any of this, though I know the reasons for which it must be done. But all I ever wanted was the truth.