When people stop caring about a game by voicing their opinion and giving feedback

[RemasteredClassic]

That’s when you know it’s over. None of the stuff collected matters when all previous content has been rendered obsolete and irrelevant.

Edit: meant to say “by no longer voicing their opinions...etc” that’s when you know they moved on and stopped caring or bothering.

Now it’s haters vs haters. It’s all just hate now. My crappy game vs your crappy game. We hate them all but will play the one we hate less. This is where we got ourselves at now. MMO Gaming is doomed.

I don’t even wanna touch another mmo if this goes on. WoW not only killed itself but the entire genre.

[DarkAmbient]

It's a point that people often miss. People complain because they care and want it to be better. There's always trolls who like to shit on things regardless, but when the overall chatter dies down you know things are bad. Look at the EU class forums. The 2nd from top post on the mage forum was made 8 days ago.

[Twdft]

It's a point that people often miss. People complain because they care and want it to be better. There's always trolls who like to shit on things regardless, but when the overall chatter dies down you know things are bad. Look at the EU class forums. The 2nd from top post on the mage forum was made 8 days ago.

There's a difference between criticism and mindless dev hating. Too much of the latter going on. And it's drowning out normal criticism. You can see it on mmo-c all the time, someone voices criticism, some haters join the thread and spew enormous amounts of hatred towards Blizzard and not the problem itself. Normal posters start defending against the mindless hate and get called white nights. Back and forth, discussion over after a page or two and nobody argueing about the problem anymore. Drives people off.

As for class forums: they pretty much died when class discords became a thing. Just go there.

[Mysterymask]

As for class forums: they pretty much died when class discords became a thing. Just go there.

Yeah this x100 when more efficient ways to discuss the game became a thing (Twitter, Reddit, Discord) Forums just kinda died out

[Jessicka]

Yeah this x100 when more efficient ways to discuss the game became a thing (Twitter, Reddit, Discord) Forums just kinda died out

All okay for a conversation, all utterly useless for tracking and keeping a record of anything.

[Mysterymask]

All okay for a conversation, all utterly useless for tracking and keeping a record of anything.

Have you been in the wow community at any point? We would literally line up to get raped by a clown if its a more efficient DPS increase and complain about it WHILE GETTING BACK IN LINE!

[cparle87]

There's a difference between criticism and mindless dev hating. Too much of the latter going on. And it's drowning out normal criticism. You can see it on mmo-c all the time, someone voices criticism, some haters join the thread and spew enormous amounts of hatred towards Blizzard and not the problem itself. Normal posters start defending against the mindless hate and get called white nights. Back and forth, discussion over after a page or two and nobody argueing about the problem anymore. Drives people off.

As for class forums: they pretty much died when class discords became a thing. Just go there.

Just look at this FF vs WoW thing. The WoW haters refer to players as "addicts" and people who have quit as "refugees." Some guy did a post of features both MMOs had. Spend like 10 lines describing everything there is to do in FF, and for WoW just wrote down "raiding." And then tried to talk about how much more FF has to do.

Though I do admit I have seem the websites die down quite a bit. Look at old gear from vanilla or BC. There will be dozens of posts inspecting its stats, what builds it's BiS for, how it compares to other gear available at that point, and so on. You visit pages for newer gear and sometimes there's no comments at all.

[Dzonathan]

There's a difference between criticism and mindless dev hating. Too much of the latter going on. And it's drowning out normal criticism. You can see it on mmo-c all the time, someone voices criticism, some haters join the thread and spew enormous amounts of hatred towards Blizzard and not the problem itself. Normal posters start defending against the mindless hate and get called white nights. Back and forth, discussion over after a page or two and nobody argueing about the problem anymore. Drives people off.

As for class forums: they pretty much died when class discords became a thing. Just go there.

Genuine questions:
Where is the line between criticism and hate?
Where is the breaking point which repeated complaints against a dev decision cannot cross even though said dev decision is backed by nothing but stubbornness which deserves the hate?
Is it wrong to hate stubborn developers who consistently keep to their stubborn bad game design choice despite repeated outcry against it?
Why is it wrong for players to get increasing disappointed to the point of becoming hateful exactly because of stubborn game dev decision?
Why is it alright to expect consumers to be complacent and not get increasingly angry?
Why insist on the idea of keeping civil discourse over a year when it results in no changes over the course of the year only to finally have them implemented past the point where it matters? No, sometimes late is worse than never because it feels like a taunt instead of concession of good will.

[Jessicka]

Genuine questions:
Where is the line between criticism and hate?
Where is the breaking point which repeated complaints against a dev decision cannot cross even though said dev decision is backed by nothing but stubbornness which deserves the hate?
Is it wrong to hate stubborn developers who consistently keep to their stubborn bad game design choice despite repeated outcry against it?
Why is it wrong for players to get increasing disappointed to the point of becoming hateful exactly because of stubborn game dev decision?
Why is it alright to expect consumers to be complacent and not get increasingly angry?
Why insist on the idea of keeping civil discourse over a year when it results in no changes over the course of the year only to finally have them implemented past the point where it matters? No, sometimes late is worse than never because it feels like a taunt instead of concession of good will.

Criticism tries to offer an explanation as to why something is bad, it doesn't have to offer solutions, but it usually has some direction to it. Hate is pretty aimless and generally incoherent.

Example criticism: "Dune was badly paced, slow, made excessive use of slow-motion dream sequences that slowed it down further, and made a long film feel really long, and hurt any sense of peril and urgency that it attempted to portray."

Example hate: "Dune sucked because Paul Atreides is a twat".

[potis]

Genuine questions:
Where is the line between criticism and hate?

Its simple, knowledge on the subject.

The average WoW player has no clue about the actual game itself, you can see it on here daily, 99% of the responses to anything is mindless drivel and full of nonsense, the official WoW forum is the same, why would any dev take the players seriously?

I work IT related jobs and 99.9% of my clients can be classified as mentally retarded compared to my knowledge, why would the dev act any differently?

The devs make mistakes, but their mistake is that they choose a different % of players to focus on every expansion, to try and keep everyone happy, and thats whats biting them in the ass.

The game has different problems every expansion, but listening to the players is their biggest mistake for the last 10 years, everyone thinks these changes magically happened, some marketing gimmicks to prolong subs is Blizzards doing, but i love how everyone acts that 90% of the changes arent player requests over the years.

[EntertainmentNihilist]

The human mind is riddled with cognitive biases - and people, in a sense, like to be negative. It's easy for people to get stuck in a "negativity feedback loop" - where you find/invent reasons why everything Blizzard (in this case) does is bad. It's easy to come up with a "rational" argument to justify hating something you want to hate. It's easy to convince yourself you are the logical, reasonable person here.

It's toxic, it sucks. I've caught myself doing it before and had to break out of the mindset. Cynicism is bad.

[DarkAmbient]

There's a difference between criticism and mindless dev hating. Too much of the latter going on. And it's drowning out normal criticism. You can see it on mmo-c all the time, someone voices criticism, some haters join the thread and spew enormous amounts of hatred towards Blizzard and not the problem itself. Normal posters start defending against the mindless hate and get called white nights. Back and forth, discussion over after a page or two and nobody argueing about the problem anymore. Drives people off.

As for class forums: they pretty much died when class discords became a thing. Just go there.

It ain't just Blizzard though

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mmo-c...ection_traffic

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wowhe...ection_traffic

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...=%2Fm%2F021dvx

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...mmo%20champion

People are losing interest.

[Mysterymask]

It ain't just Blizzard though

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/mmo-c...ection_traffic

https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/wowhe...ection_traffic

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...=%2Fm%2F021dvx

https://trends.google.com/trends/exp...mmo%20champion

People are losing interest.

TBF there's very little reason to come here anymore.

Strategy is better done on class discords or YouTube, Wowhead and YouTube is simply better for news, Reddit seems to have more people per capita that actually somewhat LIKE the game, meanwhile you can't type any kind of of forum post on wow general here without someone calling for Ion's decapitation or something.

[Afrospinach]

People are losing interest.

Damn this forum is more european than US right now.

Never would have guessed.

[ghostprotocol]

This is simply a stage of growth as a person and you leave childish things behind and move on with your life.

You're not the first or last person to quit out. You have simply outgrown it, eventually you won't even bother posting anymore because it is irrelevant in your life. Know when to quit and stop hanging on and giving pointless opinions on a game you don't even play anymore. Preach /s

[Beefhammer]

That’s when you know it’s over. None of the stuff collected matters when all previous content has been rendered obsolete and irrelevant.

If people stopped caring about the game they wouldn't voice their concerns at all.

[Kralljin]

Too much of the latter going on. And it's drowning out normal criticism.

Blizzard had private forums and discords set up to get feedback from theorycrafters, world first raiders and cutting edge PvP'ers.
Whenever one of those spoke out in regards to feedback, the answer was pretty much: The devs don't listen.

Disregarding that, it's Blizzard job, or more specifically the job of CM's, to weed out bad feedback and provide concise good feedback to the developers.
It's not the job of a developer to scout through the forums and look for good feedback, that's what CM's do, among other things.

Even if you want to argue that the discourse has become less productive, the fact remains that Blizzard has had access to the reasonable crowd of the community and it's well within their ability to hire people (CM's) to sort out good feedback.

People who operate an MMO for over 16 years should have learned the lesson that a large anonymous crowd isn't going to magically police itself.

[Accendor]

There's a difference between criticism and mindless dev hating. Too much of the latter going on. And it's drowning out normal criticism. You can see it on mmo-c all the time, someone voices criticism, some haters join the thread and spew enormous amounts of hatred towards Blizzard and not the problem itself. Normal posters start defending against the mindless hate and get called white nights. Back and forth, discussion over after a page or two and nobody argueing about the problem anymore. Drives people off.

As for class forums: they pretty much died when class discords became a thing. Just go there.

Yeah... Discords are not really a good way to look for information or discussion, so...

[Doffen]

Blizzard has listened way too much and has made a game with very few incentives to log in and play except doing instanced content. Which do get boring after 17 years. Which is why the changes in modern WoW was a necessity 5-7 years back. But they are going back on it now, and people are not surprisingly unsubbing.

Because the vocals are never the right people to listen too. People are quitting, because the myth you read on forums that people just want to raid, dungeon and do pvp is false. The raid participation in SL is at "modern" WoW's highest percentage wise vs players playing. There is no 5% anymore. Not because much less people raid, since its only down(raider.io)18% on HC from BoD in BfA to SoD, and that despite the long content draught in SL while from Legion to BfA the raid participation went down 35% from Nighthold to BoD in HC, which tells a worse story in BfA.

It just so telling that the raiders are not the one group which affected the most directly, but the one that are quitting or taking breaks are those who want more than just that. They are not content with how the game is designed in SL, with a heavily diminished experience outside instanced content. There is no need to log in after two weeks in each patch in SL because the character progression for the majority is close to non existant and is too weak to be bothered doing.

What do that lead to? As said, Raid logging. And thats not what people want in modern WoW, overall. They want a reason to log on every day to power their characters. What happens when Blizzard listens to those that want to play WoW 8 hours a week to raid? The rest falls off. I see it in my guild too. Those who only raided before bar some material farms, they still play. But those who played the game for more reasons have more or less quit, because they find so few reasons to log in and play, thus we aint raiding atm because we effectively lost 50% of the raid force.

[ArenaDk]

Criticism tries to offer an explanation as to why something is bad, it doesn't have to offer solutions, but it usually has some direction to it. Hate is pretty aimless and generally incoherent.

Example criticism: "Dune was badly paced, slow, made excessive use of slow-motion dream sequences that slowed it down further, and made a long film feel really long, and hurt any sense of peril and urgency that it attempted to portray."

Example hate: "Dune sucked because Paul Atreides is a twat".

There was an interesting interview with one of the Magic the gathering main designer who explained 10 important rules for designing cards / content.

One thing that stuck with me was ‚‘ Players are really good in showing whats bad , but horrible in finding solutions for it‘‘

It may sound a little like ´´ you think you do ´ ´ but he is kinda right and thats what many people dont understand. Complaining about X , saying they should do Y and than being mad that a company didnt do Y but ZY or just Z, is a big issue in the wow community.

We lack a lot of informations to how things work and worked. So the best critic we should give is, X has the issue Y because of Z. But. but not focus on how we expact it to be changed