Another leak about what's going on at Blizzard

[Lady Atia]

What "FOMO" in WoW wasn't a person able to get if he played the game?

Well you couldn't get Gladiator mounts that easily in the past. To be fair, I meant FOMO for casuals rather than elite content, because I think they need to hook the casual playerbase again - be it through a battle pass system, housing or a single q for rated bg's. Or maybe all three of these things.

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t.Cringemonger who needs fake exclusivity to feel like a big boy

I'm not sure what your sentence is supposed to mean, but I'll try to answer you: I'm actually quite happy with my seasonal rewards, thank you. I don't see how it would make me a special snowflake if everyone who pays for a battle pass can get some FOMO cosmetics while playing all parts of the game, lmao.

[Hugnomo]

Bunch of nonsense and Danuser derangement syndrome.

Yep. I subscribe to this comment.

[Kiivar86]

What Battle tank?

The black Qiraji mount that one could get if you rang the gong within 12 hours (or whatever it was) of AQ's opening.

[BreakerOfWills]

the problem with half these "leaks" is that they think that quest stuff is being written now - as opposed to yknow, 12-18 months ago, as if production pipelines aren't a thing. Deciding what to show people is a relatively short process, even lining up devs to talk about what to show, but making it? that shit takes a while, we know it takes a while. Unless you think Blizz, one of the stingiest companies in gaming right now(which we know for a fact) has production staff waiting around for 6-8 months at a time doing nothing (which is what people definitely think) cuz folks swear content takes as long to produce as it does to play.

[sunxsera]

Only FOMO that you can't realistically get is bad design imo. Having some stuff that's going away but you will get it if you play is actually good design as it gives players a reason to play a game instead of just playing it for a few weeks every content update.

Nah, i prefer to have a game that doesn't "force me" to play and instead convinces me with good overall gameplay. The reason to play a game should be the game itself - and not some shiny season pass rewards that i payed for.

[The Stormbringer]

Can someone post the next fake leak? This one has been run into the ground. We need something else to entertain us.

[Relapses]

You know as well as everyone else does that the term "borrowed power" refers to a specific set of design principles implemented beginning with Legion which are substantively different than the type of "borrowed power" you are referring to in vanilla. Being a pedantic definition-warrior doesn't further any discussion.

That's rich coming from you of all people. Are you going to share with us how your 25 years as the CEO of Pedantry Inc have given you the expert insight you need to determine the voracity of all semantic arguments?

Joking aside, I was mostly pointing out that nearly every player has an ideal version of the game and when people say that they like certain borrow powers and not others they should be more honest with themselves and admit that they just want to play their favorite expansion again instead of demanding Blizzard just re-release their favorite expansion with a different name.

[Diatribe]

I'm of the belief that much of these leaks are from Blizzard themselves. They'll wrap a bunch of what they want to do with the coo-coo for coco puffs nonsense to make it seem illegitimate and then gauge players reactions to each point.

[RichardRoe]

Horrendously short sighted comic. It is essentially equating 3 situations that are nothing alike as if they boil down to the same thing. A person posting from an iphone, complaining about apple not paying taxes or decent wages while having myriads of other cell phone companies to choose from where they can get equivalent if not better quality cell phones for less money and better company practices is not the same as a car owner in the 1900s advocating for seat belts when there was not a choice to get one. Or a peasant in the middle ages wanting society to improve when they cannot realistically get out of a lifestyle they were born into.
The dude with the iphone is light years more hypocritical than the other 2 who one can argue are not hypocritical at all.

That's a long way to say "I don't get it". The point isn't that they're all hypocrites or that they're all the same.
You're basically being the person the comic is making fun of if that helps.

[Indigenously Abled]

Horrendously short sighted comic. It is essentially equating 3 situations that are nothing alike as if they boil down to the same thing. A person posting from an iphone, complaining about apple not paying taxes or decent wages while having myriads of other cell phone companies to choose from where they can get equivalent if not better quality cell phones for less money and better company practices is not the same as a car owner in the 1900s advocating for seat belts when there was not a choice to get one. Or a peasant in the middle ages wanting society to improve when they cannot realistically get out of a lifestyle they were born into.
The dude with the iphone is light years more hypocritical than the other 2 who one can argue are not hypocritical at all.

Pretty much everything the user you quoted posts is pseudo-intellectual, passive-aggressive, or wholly disingenuous. Best to just not engage with them.

[qwerty123456]

Only FOMO that you can't realistically get is bad design imo. Having some stuff that's going away but you will get it if you play is actually good design as it gives players a reason to play a game instead of just playing it for a few weeks every content update.

Because it forces people to constantly play/grind to get the content which leads to faster burnout. You aren't allowed to play at your own pace. Plus wow already has some FOMO content like with ahead of the curve and adding even more FOMO content would mean fewer and fewer breaks you could get without losing any content.

[rogoth]

I know and you can feel it here the best.

Come in any thread were some loser uses this line; and yet your argument is invalid so many options with: and yet. Not even kidding 90% here is doing this lmao.

lets break down this utterly asinine 'comic strip' one box at a time:

first/second box: apple, along with samsung and google HEAVILY push 'phone service providers' to get people to sign up for contracts using the latest iphone/galaxy/pixel etc essentially pushing any other competition out of the market space, making them THE MOST prevalent handheld devices in circulation due to ease of accessibility, and usually cheapest of cost due to having fixed price contracts paid monthly with little to no upfront cost on these devices which if bought outright day 1 would cost thousands of dollars even for the most 'basic' of models, the person making the post is more than valid in having that opinion regarding the utterly disgusting cost of 'airpods' (which didn't need to exist to begin with but here we are), and the inhumane 'pay' the people who manufacture these goods overseas usually in china/SEA are paid for their time and expertise relative to the eye gouging price they paid for the product, making the 'gotcha' arguement to use your terminology, 'invalid'.

third box should be pretty self explanatory in why it is and invalid arguement, based on the type of vehicle depicted it's suggesting that the 'motorcar' is one of the earliest produced vehicles where people had no concept of 'personal safety' because at the time the fastest you could travel was in horse drawn carriage, which by comparison to a motorised car was a snails pace, meaning that as a result of the vastly increased speed of transport relative to what was currently available, there needed to be consideration for personal safety devices.

final box i just don't understand the point of this one, it's obviously drawn to depict the time setting being middle ages during the feudal era, likely in britain or mainland europe somewhere, once again, the person suggesting to improve society is a tiny piece of the overall societal landscape and even if they could enact some form of change it would require the hivemind to also adopt it, making the 'gotcha' point as you said 'invalid'.

i fail to see you're point really, are you trying to say that people on these forums are the individuals who have the concept ideas, or are you saying that people here are trying to enact this so called 'intellectual' in this comic boards?, because all the time i have been on here (since the website first launched), i have seen plenty of both and yet you're making the sweeping generalisation that it's '90% here' which is obviously hyperbole.


as to the topic at hand, i could easily see the majority of it being true, with a few falsehoods thrown in for good measure to obscure/distract from the truths so as to be brushed off as all false making it easier to 'leak' stuff in the future, the biggest points that are likely very true is the player count, not only is this backed up to a degree by player stats that can be obtained through the public API, but also anecdotally through the fact that bobby kotick at the last investor call did not segregate any 'WoW' product when talking about MAU's, he just used the broad umbrella of 'world of warcraft' when previously in investor calls they used all individual components of the franchise naming each exclusive title when talking about MAU's for WoW, this suggests that he was doing this to obscure the true numbers for each title and by giving the overall number inflate it to make it look less of a bomb than it really is.

it's also very plain to see that steve danuser has a raging throbbing erection for the sylvanas character, and it's blatantly obvious as the head game writer that his little pet is the only thing he seems to want to have a spotlight on, i wouldn't be surprised if he has a signed photo of her in his bedroom he wanks to on a weekly basis his sycophancy is that obvious and detested, as to the specifics here couldn't say but they are definitely believable based on past experience.

finally the one that sticks out to me as believable is that in his latest interview Ion was asked about cross faction raiding and using the convenient (and well worn out) story of 'well if jaina and thrall can team up why can't players', they (blizzard) went out of their way years ago to come up with 'phasing' technology, they then went out of their way to come up with 'linked servers', it's a well known fact in this business as soon as you talk about merging servers on a live service game that's the big nono for investors and when they start pulling out because it's known then that you no longer have the 'cows to be milked' like you did before and as a result won't be as profitable as previously, blizzard has gone above and beyond to avoid doing that at every turn when it's been demanded of players, they would rather offer free character transfers and shutdown servers under the pretence of making new servers for specific languages (like they did back in cataclysm) than actually come out and say a server is dead and is therefore being shutdown.

[Beefhammer]

Nah, i prefer to have a game that doesn't "force me" to play and instead convinces me with good overall gameplay. The reason to play a game should be the game itself - and not some shiny season pass rewards that i payed for.

I'm going to guess you are a GenXer or older? I say that because I'm in the same boat and it's a reason I still ay WoW, because I find what I do in the game fun and don't need any shiny reward to play.

Unfortunately, for the last 20 years or so, it's all about them shinies for the greater majority of gamers. You see it all over the place. Take BotW, people hated that journey to figure out how to get to the top of that cool land mark you saw mile away was the reward. They wanted quality rewards to even be assed to go do something. Nintendo even trolled players by giving them a golden piece of shit for collecting all 900 korok seeds. Just saying go play and have fun, they rewards shouldn't be the reason to play.

I remember just playing and enjoying playing the games, it didn't matter if beat the game, I didn't need a shiny reward for exploring a map or killing that elite monster.

But I'm some weirdo for liking WoW and not needing great endgame systems. Me, my wife and our friends in our guild just enjoy raiding with each other. Recently, we've never gotten into or very far into mythic, and a few times have never finished the heroic before the next raid came out. We don't even care if we don't, we just have fun.

[NineSpine]

That's rich coming from you of all people. Are you going to share with us how your 25 years as the CEO of Pedantry Inc have given you the expert insight you need to determine the voracity of all semantic arguments?

Joking aside, I was mostly pointing out that nearly every player has an ideal version of the game and when people say that they like certain borrow powers and not others they should be more honest with themselves and admit that they just want to play their favorite expansion again instead of demanding Blizzard just re-release their favorite expansion with a different name.

I don't think thats the case. Maybe it is for some people, but broadly I think that WoW was (in a very macro sense) one game 10 years ago and now it is a very different game. I think its a return to different basic design principles, not a return to a specific expansion.

There are very, very, very few complaints from anyone about the content itself, and that is the tip off that this isn't about content. This is about systems. Putting aside the horrendous story, everything in Shadowlands is fine if it had the right systems around it.

[Kageaki]

Pretty much everything the user you quoted posts is pseudo-intellectual, passive-aggressive, or wholly disingenuous. Best to just not engage with them.

I find Relapses posts quite objective and rational actually. One of the rare sane voices here amidst the circlejerking bellular and preach fanboys who aren't even playing the content they whine about. Maybe you just can't look past that with your wow / blizz hate goggles on?

Quick! Better make a new tinfoil hat comment on the next hate bandwagon thread. Blizzard bad. Lawyer bad. FRUITBOWL LOL SO FUNNEE

[Myradin]

I went on vacation for a week, came back, and people are still discussing this clearly fake leak?

[T-34]

Because it forces people to constantly play/grind to get the content which leads to faster burnout. You aren't allowed to play at your own pace. Plus wow already has some FOMO content like with ahead of the curve and adding even more FOMO content would mean fewer and fewer breaks you could get without losing any content.

"FOMO" is put in to any game in order to make you take as few breaks as possible.
And if more "FOMO" would make you take less breaks then it works as intended.

Blizzard has stated many times that the times when the majority of the players were constantly subscribed are gone, so Blizzard, and virtually all other game companies, are doing their best to make as many as possible to play their game as long as possible between content patches as that makes them more revenue in the long run.

Blizzard does not want you to subscribe one month before the launch of the next expac so you can collect all the titles and shines. Blizzard wants you to be subscribed for many months, not necessarily consecutive months, so you can collect all the shinies.

Edit: I have no great feelings about time-limited content, no matter if it is targetted at skilled/unskilled casual/hardcore, but if we want "FOMO" gone then we need to come up with a solution that gives Blizzard the same revenue or more. Or else it is unrealistic that it will get implemented.

[FelPlague]

It is in quantity, but not in price. 30 euros for a mount is almost the same price as an expansion.
But, it is starting to catch up in frequency.
We have now had 2 mounts and an outfit in 3 months, where we used to have 1 mount every 6 months.

2 mounts in 3 months? what 2 mounts?
furline sunwarmer, but what is the other one?

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Many of the leaks, even before shadowlands, have claimed a focus on moving towards more mobile based style gameplay, an endless grind to continue to gain more power, and no true ability to ever be "done" with the game. Covenant rewards strongly reek of seasonal battle pass stuff. I would be 0% surprised if future "covenant rewards" in 10.0 and onward had an additional paid tier for even more cosmetics. We shall see.

Many of the things in the July leak were true, and a lot are still unconfirmed. If Sylvanas becomes the new arbiter, it'll lend a lot of credibility to the leak. We already know the team is going for some dumb Sylvanas redemption arc.

"Many things in the july leak were true"
got that leak link? do you mean the one that was literally proven wrong MULTIPLE times?

which i wanna point out, has ALREADY been proven wrong again, because we already know sylvanas is not becoming the new arbiter, pelagos is...

[unbound]

Blizzard has stated many times that the times when the majority of the players were constantly subscribed are gone...

And this absolutely true.

Now, think about why this would be true. What happened in the time between when majority of players were constantly subscribed and current expansions?

How many dungeons, raids, etc (i.e. actual content, not difficulty sliders) were released in BC and Wrath? How many in the last 5 expansions? Similarly, how many new systems (at that time) were introduced in BC and Wrath, and nothing truly new (or laughably stupid things like Garrisons v1, v2, v3, v4) since?

Blizz got cheap with players, so they left. Blizz figures, correctly based on financials, that they can just trade out actually providing content for PR hype that will draw short (but profitable) spikes in spending (expansion cost, microtransactions) while milking what remains of the subs on xmogs, collectibles (mounts, pets), and achievements.

Blizz still would have been wildly profitable by providing actual content and maintaining a lot of loyal players, but they opted for the lower cost but higher margin approach instead. They are a corporation with one loyalty only; not the players, but just the profit by any means necessary.

[T-34]

And this absolutely true.

Now, think about why this would be true. What happened in the time between when majority of players were constantly subscribed and current expansions?

How many dungeons, raids, etc (i.e. actual content, not difficulty sliders) were released in BC and Wrath? How many in the last 5 expansions? Similarly, how many new systems (at that time) were introduced in BC and Wrath, and nothing truly new (or laughably stupid things like Garrisons v1, v2, v3, v4) since?

Blizz got cheap with players, so they left. Blizz figures, correctly based on financials, that they can just trade out actually providing content for PR hype that will draw short (but profitable) spikes in spending (expansion cost, microtransactions) while milking what remains of the subs on xmogs, collectibles (mounts, pets), and achievements.

Blizz still would have been wildly profitable by providing actual content and maintaining a lot of loyal players, but they opted for the lower cost but higher margin approach instead. They are a corporation with one loyalty only; not the players, but just the profit by any means necessary.

I 100% agree you with that Blizzard is a corporation that only has one loyalty - and that is profit. That just shows that Blizzard is a business just like any other.
Anyone who thought/thinks otherwise is at best very naive.

I don't disagree disagree that some of Blizzard's decisions have pushed some players away, but some of the decisions have kept some players that otherwise would have left.
And the inclusion of various difficulties, and a sliding scale for M+, has done wonders for keeping players playing that have a competitive spirit, no matter of their skill/playtime.

Furthermore the world has changed from the beginning of the 2000's where WoW was a/the social hub for many players. Today that has been replaced by a multitude of other platform.
That means that many/some players treat WoW today as one of many activities/platforms and not just the activity/platform. And Blizzard has adapted to that change.

Too much of this discussion is focused on Blizzard and not on how the world and those that play WoW/potential WoW players have changed since the game started.
the world is vastly different now today, the internet is vastly different today.