Seems like development team 2 is doing what they want with the game.

[Rozz]

Its actually kinda interesting to see how much of the we must support the victims against evil Activision Blizzard mentality that just vanished the moment the victims started to want to make changes to the game.

It's why I can't laugh at the bowl of fruit memes, a lot of the ppl I see making them have the same fratboy mentality that resulted in these problems in the first place.

I also hit a big 'X to doubt' when people are actually angry about these changes because I have yet to see it come from a genuine place of concern.

Edit: I shouldn't say genuine concern, because they do care but in a way I can't agree with or is being taken advantage of by others to mock any change at all.

[Ielenia]

There’s like what tens of thousands of lines of text/thousands of voiced dialogue in game and like a hundred framed pictures and few hundred un framed ones in game, I’d say the amount changed comes to a relative few.

But we're not talking "relativity" here. It's not "eh, relative to the whole, it's not much." We're talking about the changes on their own. Things the player base uses on an almost daily basis, in the case of jokes and flirts.

Its actually kinda interesting to see how much of the we must support the victims against evil Activision Blizzard mentality that just vanished the moment the victims started to want to make changes to the game.

That's... such an overly simplistic way of describing it, it skims the line between truth and misrepresentation. Also, they are not "wanting to make changes". The changes have been made, already.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

But we're not talking "relativity" here. It's not "eh, relative to the whole, it's not much." We're talking about the changes on their own. Things the player base uses on an almost daily basis, in the case of jokes and flirts.

Of course we’re talking on a relative basis to the whole you couldn’t ever come to a few if your only talking about the changes alone.

[Ielenia]

Of course we’re talking on a relative basis to the whole you couldn’t ever come to a few if your only talking about the changes alone.

We can quantify the changes without comparing them to the whole. If you come back home with a few dozen 2-liter bottles of soda, and I say "that's a lot of soda", you wouldn't say "that's actually very little soda, considering the market had hundreds of 2-liter bottles of soda", would you?

[NineSpine]

I see we have gone all the way from "CORPORATE TELLS THE DESIGNERS WHAT TO DO AND IT'S RUINING THE GAME!" to "WHY ISN'T CORPORATE TELLING THE DESIGNERS WHAT TO DO?"

[Lorgar Aurelian]

We can quantify the changes without comparing them to the whole. If you come back home with a few dozen 2-liter bottles of soda, and I say "that's a lot of soda", you wouldn't say "that's actually very little soda, considering the market had hundreds of 2-liter bottles of soda", would you?

the problem is in this analogy I'm not brining any thing back I'm talking about the stock as a whole and how little has been removed. its like if I was talking about the stock of the store, I would say they have hundreds left if some one bought a few dozen, if some one else wanted to say well ya but those dozen's are gone I would point out how few that number is when compared to what's left in stock. which is the exactly conversation were having.

but here, Out of all of the things removed 100% of them were removed, we should be out raged!

[vincink]

I see we have gone all the way from "CORPORATE TELLS THE DESIGNERS WHAT TO DO AND IT'S RUINING THE GAME!" to "WHY ISN'T CORPORATE TELLING THE DESIGNERS WHAT TO DO?"

That's a reduction too far. Whoever is steering the company from the top-- the ambiguous "corporate"-- is looking at income versus expenditures for the markets the company operates in. And they are trying to decipher what the future holds. If they see a threat coming from afar, they will take action to avoid or minimize the damage. But if they miss the sign of a threat and get blindsided by, say, reputation damage, they will immediately take corrective action. Any management, be it a single person or a board of directors, would be wrong not to take corrective action if something is eating away at revenue.

Edit: but I agree with the commentary on the aimless swing of opinions-- it always comes back to blaming corporate for everything. Technical that is true but it is highly reductive.

[Samsara]

Having worked at a corporate entity (smaller than Blizzard but the bigger the entity, the truer my next statement is) We as players need to understand one thing. These "layman" devs from team 2 or whichever team ARE the corporate blizz we accuse of being out of touch with the community and making money based decisions in detriment of the game, they are the ones making it unfun systems over systems, wrecking the narrative, and are responsible for the state the game is in right now. It is impossible that they went "rogue" that just does not happen in a corporate environment, there are approvals, redundancies and systems over systems to ensure that "going rouge" is something that just can't happen.

[Thestrawman]

Having worked at a corporate entity (smaller than Blizzard but the bigger the entity, the truer my next statement is) We as players need to understand one thing. These "layman" devs from team 2 or whichever team ARE the corporate blizz we accuse of being out of touch with the community and making money based decisions in detriment of the game, they are the ones making it unfun systems over systems, wrecking the narrative, and are responsible for the state the game is in right now. It is impossible that they went "rogue" that just does not happen in a corporate environment, there are approvals, redundancies and systems over systems to ensure that "going rouge" is something that just can't happen.

But if people realize that how can they possibly be mad at the evil blue haired SJWs while continuing to lavish Blizz with praise?

[MoanaLisa]

I find this argument always odd, because it effectively exposes LFR just as a tool to prob up engagement metrics, rather than being genuine content for a more casual playerbase.

It can be both.

Like, people argued about whether LFR is good for the game or not, perhaps the better debate would be whether LFR is actually good content.

It was certainly good for the raiding part of the game since raids are still a thing. While not a huge fan of LFR myself it has served its purpose well and is fine as an end game for casual players who want a guaranteed seat in raid-designed content. It's certainly a better situation than not having it at all, a huge majority of the customer base shut out of raids and consequently raid budgets being drastically cut due to non-participation.

[perkocet]

Armchair statisticians are truly the worst part of the internet in 2021, I gotta say. Especially ones that are so loud and so wrong.

[Kralljin]

It's certainly a better situation than not having it at all, a huge majority of the customer base shut out of raids and consequently raid budgets being drastically cut due to non-participation.

I think that's a shortsighted way of thinking.

I think that a sizeable portion of a raid's budget goes into art, creating unique enviroments and whatnot, which is just questionable considering how the reward structure is designed to make those raids completely irrelevant within ~6 months.

Raiders care far more about the Itemization / Rewards and the Encounter design, which is likely not the lion's share of budget for raiding and something the more casual cares less about.
Especially the encounter design, considering how LFR encounters basically need to have any mechanics nerfed into the ground / neutered in order to be manageable for the LFR audience.

In The Classic / TBC days, Raids also weren't sprawling with unique enviroments and assets and those assets were re used to create more content, such as 5man dungeons.

[MoanaLisa]

I think that's a shortsighted way of thinking.

Short-sighted? LFR is 10 years old next month. Developers and management have been clear that the last ten years of raids would be nothing like they were without it. I'm not going to disagree with you about what's important to the 10-15% of those who participate in organized raiding but it's hard to imagine smaller raids, more reused assets, few bosses and fewer raids altogether would not have been noticed.

Have we already forgotten all of the massive bitching about "X costing a raid tier." Without LFR there would have been many fewer raid tiers over the last decade.

[Kralljin]

but it's hard to imagine smaller raids, more reused assets, few bosses and fewer raids altogether would not have been noticed.

I don't think Raids would be smaller, just not as pompous in their presentation as they are now.

Take Eternal Palace for example, it's a completely unique enviroment, maybe all those art designers could've used some of that and also created a 5man dungeon alongside it, then not every single boss has a room unique room.

In general, Blizzard has started to favour Quality over Quantity, which in my opinion is not the best call when it comes to dungeons interior design.

Have we already forgotten all of the massive bitching about "X costing a raid tier." Without LFR there would have been many fewer raid tiers over the last decade.

I always felt like this was more of a deadbeat argument to shoot down any suggestions that Blizzard doesn't want to engage in.
"Oh you don't want X? Well, that costs a raid tier!".

[Kallisto]

In The Classic / TBC days, Raids also weren't sprawling with unique enviroments and assets and those assets were re used to create more content, such as 5man dungeons.

Which lead to actual comments and attacks by raiders on how blizzard was lazy for not making every asset unique and reusing art assets all over the place.

[Kralljin]

Which lead to actual comments and attacks by raiders on how blizzard was lazy for not making every asset unique and reusing art assets all over the place.

Depends on how you use them.

I think re using Assets in BRD, UBRS / LBRS & BWL certainly didn't feel cheap, after all, the entire complex was made by the same group.
When you however go down the route of TBC, such as Auchindoun, where you take 4 tubular dungeons filled with different enemy types, it doesn't go down that well.

Disregarding that, resources are finite and you can't make everyone happy, if you measure a plan by whether anyone will criticize it, you might as well never commit to anything.

[RoKPaNda]

It's why I can't laugh at the bowl of fruit memes, a lot of the ppl I see making them have the same fratboy mentality that resulted in these problems in the first place.

I also hit a big 'X to doubt' when people are actually angry about these changes because I have yet to see it come from a genuine place of concern.

Edit: I shouldn't say genuine concern, because they do care but in a way I can't agree with or is being taken advantage of by others to mock any change at all.

I think a lot of people don't understand that having things in game that were designed or added by abusers isn't healthy for the people designing the game after those abusers are removed. What I never liked was when people would respond with things like "Nobody asked for this." in regards to removing emotes, but a quick google search will show you that people were asking for the removal of /spit as far back as vanilla. It wasn't a super popular request or anything at the time, but people have asked for it.

It can be both.

It was certainly good for the raiding part of the game since raids are still a thing. While not a huge fan of LFR myself it has served its purpose well and is fine as an end game for casual players who want a guaranteed seat in raid-designed content. It's certainly a better situation than not having it at all, a huge majority of the customer base shut out of raids and consequently raid budgets being drastically cut due to non-participation.

I try to explain this often and often people just don't get it. As a mythic raider in WoW the single best change that Blizzard ever made to this game for me was adding LFR. Since they added LFR and actually got people into raiding even if you don't consider LFR raiding it allowed them to dedicate more resources to raiding and raids have been better ever since that point. We don't have shit like Trial of the Crusader anymore, we don't get raids that are tiny and 100% reused assets either like Firelands. Firelands was a great raid tier but probably the least effort ever in terms of actually designing the raid. It's less well designed than Molten Core which they designed in a week. Since LFR we get these huge raid tiers that feel epic and not disappointing. LFR was a hail mary by Blizzard after every single other thing they tried from Vanilla through the early Cata raids to get raid participation numbers up failed miserably. and it worked.

[munkeyinorbit]

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.

I would say that the amount of surveys sent out is probably because the data they give is next to useless. People are different and they like different things. This very website is a perfect example. Ask a simple question like "Is wow P2W" and you get a 100 page thread on the definition on what P2W is. I bet that someone will take the opportunity to take this debate up again in this thread. Blizzard have better tools at their disposal them a survey.

[Goatfish]

I try to explain this often and often people just don't get it. As a mythic raider in WoW the single best change that Blizzard ever made to this game for me was adding LFR. Since they added LFR and actually got people into raiding even if you don't consider LFR raiding it allowed them to dedicate more resources to raiding and raids have been better ever since that point. We don't have shit like Trial of the Crusader anymore, we don't get raids that are tiny and 100% reused assets either like Firelands. Firelands was a great raid tier but probably the least effort ever in terms of actually designing the raid. It's less well designed than Molten Core which they designed in a week. Since LFR we get these huge raid tiers that feel epic and not disappointing. LFR was a hail mary by Blizzard after every single other thing they tried from Vanilla through the early Cata raids to get raid participation numbers up failed miserably. and it worked.

While this is true, the cost to this is a near complete removal of reason to run previous raids. The forums in BC were full of guilds recruiting for kara, or ssc/eye, or bt/sunwell, instead now every guild is recruiting for whatever the current patch content is. I attempted to run a Nathria pug for mog the other day, and most of the people the joined thought they were joining SoD because the basic thought process is that every post in current LFG is going to be SoD even if clearly labelled CN.

I honestly don't see what's wrong with selling an adventure instead of a queue-machine where you spend all your time at max level joining queues for things. Too much of current blizzard design is clearly modeled after phone games, casual games, and lobbies. They've taken the biggest draws from the most popular games of the time and attempted to merge it into WoW. I've known this since I got into the Cata beta and there was a horde of beta testers in the forums complaining about how shit the changes were, and the official response from the bliz dev team at the time was "We know what is fun better than the players."

[Ielenia]

I'm talking about the stock as a whole and how little has been removed.

But that's meaningless. All those things being removed/changed might indeed be inconsequential when we look at the whole, but we're not talking about the whole. We're talking about something we see and use rather regularly.

What you're doing is basically saying if your neighborhood ends up without power, it's okay because the whole rest of the city still has power. Or that it's fine if the city decides to demolish the public playground in your neighborhood, because there are other public playgrounds around the city.