STOP making the game for the top 0.01% of the players! It’s killing this game

[Relapses]

So they're just stupid and incompetent then and can't tell that it's worse? I'd rather have a malicious but competent team tbh.

What the actual fuck is "malicious but competent"? This sounds like somebody who has never worked a day in their life would say. Blizzard is neither stupid nor incompetent. They're a company of human beings who sometimes make mistakes like all human beings. The point is that when we let rote cynicism dictate the conversation we're removing agency away from the developers by presuming hostile intent when none has been stated. (ie, "Blizzard doesn't want to make finding a guild easier because they want to sell server transfers") Conspiratorial thinking helps nobody and very rarely moves the conversation about ways to improve the game in a positive direction. It's a way for people to validate their negative opinions with one another without actually exercising any critical thinking and understanding the reasons behind the decisions Blizzard does or doesn't make.

Once again, I digress. If we are to talk about areas of improvement, their communication has left a lot to be desired in recent expansions; though frankly I don't blame them for being radio silent when the moment any developer tries to reach out in good faith to interface with the community its met with death threats from people who take this game way too fucking seriously.

[Animaneth]

No game company intentionally makes their product worse. This pointless cynicism is part of the reason it's so difficult to discuss ways to improve the game.

I would say that making a game grindy or timegating things your customers want, is making the game worse. But it is ok to disagree.

[Relapses]

I would say that making a game grindy or timegating things your customers want, is making the game worse. But it is ok to disagree.

The alternative to timegating in a MMO is people no-lifing the game to unhealthy levels, burning themselves and quitting. (And before you say it doesn't happen, you only need to go back to early Legion and see all the people whining about feeling compelled to no-life AP.) There are versions of timegating that are more manipulative than others but you really cannot blame a game developer for using time gates when the business model their product uses greatly incentivizes it.

[NineSpine]

]
So for a failed company that I've ever heard of in my 40 odd years of video gaming. Excellent. With that you think you can tell Blizzard a MUCH larger company with many successes that you should dictate what their game does. Hilarious sense of entitlement again.

You know Vicarious Visions is a Blizzard studio now... right?

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The alternative to timegating in a MMO is people no-lifing the game to unhealthy levels, burning themselves and quitting. (And before you say it doesn't happen, you only need to go back to early Legion and see all the people whining about feeling compelled to no-life AP.) There are versions of timegating that are more manipulative than others but you really cannot blame a game developer for using time gates when the business model their product uses greatly incentivizes it.

Timegating content and time gating rewards are not necessarily the same thing.

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The idea that an elderly disabled person should be able to enjoy something in the game is great. The idea that they should be able to enjoy the most difficult content is stupid.

Who argued for that?

[Relapses]

Timegating content and time gating rewards are not necessarily the same thing.

They're pretty close to one another and when players lament time gating they're often not differentiating between the two.

[deenman]

Yeah content wise WoW has really dipped since they started focusing on systems and mythic difficulties instead, but at least that small group of players that enjoy the esports side of the game have something to keep them occupied for a while.

exept every expansion minus maybe wod had a patch that broke previous ones content size

[KrayZ33]

No game company intentionally makes their product worse. This pointless cynicism is part of the reason it's so difficult to discuss ways to improve the game.

The alternative to timegating in a MMO is people no-lifing the game to unhealthy levels, burning themselves and quitting. (And before you say it doesn't happen, you only need to go back to early Legion and see all the people whining about feeling compelled to no-life AP.) There are versions of timegating that are more manipulative than others but you really cannot blame a game developer for using time gates when the business model their product uses greatly incentivizes it.

The devs get told what and how to design it in the end, but I sure as heck blame the company for making a game with a "worse" experience so they can get more money out of people.
It's like a version of planned obsolescence. The company gets more money out of it, the product quality suffers from it though.

So when you are saying that no game company does this, you are simply put and undeniably wrong, a lot of companies do this... I'd even argue and say the majority of the big ones with live services do it.

Shadow of Mordor's post "credits"-grind is another example. They made it intentionally worse to give the shop a reason to exist.
The trigger was the publisher that told them the game needs MTX and stuff, but the devs still designed the game to these wishes.
I heard that they reduced the grind some (long, long after release) time later and removed the shop and that the game is now better (didn't check myself though). It would be silly to assume the devs or game-company didn't know that the player experience would be better that way when they first designed the whole thing.

Or just take a look at D:I now for example or any other money grabber mobile game you can think off.
Player fun isn't the thing that they are looking for at all times.
Sometimes money and leading players to spent more money is more important. Make the inventory small so the player gets frustrated and spends money to unlock more bagpsace or an additional bagpack, for example.

Giving the player or consumer "just enough" for them to stay, but never the whole thing isn't something new. It's always been like that since "games as a service" became a thing.
But don't doubt for a second that the devs never know what would be better for the player and the experience he or she has.

[cantrip]

The alternative to timegating in a MMO is people no-lifing the game to unhealthy levels

The real alternative to artificial time gating is adding new content every month. Which is not really artificial time gating anymore, but simply the effort a "premium" mmorpg should receive.

I mean, Blizzard turned WoW into a whale hunt already. Plus subs. Plus services. Plus cosmetics. They really should have enough money to keep the game alive every month, with way more intense patch cycles. With a new dungeon all two months. With a new raid all three months. With new or evolving questing regions every month. With a developing world rather than abandoning it.

Blizzard is lazy and simply does the minimum. For a game as expensive as WoW not really reasonable. It is a cash cow nowadays and not the game it should be.

[Ashana Darkmoon]

It would be great if they could produce content quicker, and I'm sure there are management issues involved in that. Spreading some stuff out more might also help.

But there's no way you could produce content every month unless we're talking about some short quests or other stuff people will burn through in an afternoon.

I remember in 2015ish when swtor was doing monthly chapters for Knights of the Fallen Empire, and basically:
1) they couldn't even keep even that schedule
2) missions were padded with swarms of non-threatening enemies to make them last 60 min instead of 15
3) they abandoned the model the next expansion

Wow probably has 5x+ the resources Bioware Austin did even back then, but there's still no way. The content cadence in Legion required them to sacrifice WoD and mega-crunch to pull it off, I don't think we'll ever see that again.

[Kyriani]

FFXIV manages a content patch every 3-4 months. I'd like to think Blizzard could do at least something every 4 months. Not saying a raid, but additional questlines at the very least. I also miss getting new dungeons that I can actually queue for when they come out, not months later after the one mega dungeon that was mythic only finally gets split into 2 wings and queueable as heroic. And of course by then, the gear from the dungeon is worse than I what I tend to have at that point.

[NineSpine]

FFXIV manages a content patch every 3-4 months. I'd like to think Blizzard could do at least something every 4 months. Not saying a raid, but additional questlines at the very least. I also miss getting new dungeons that I can actually queue for when they come out, months later after the one mega dungeon that was mythic only finally gets split into 2 wings and queueable as heroic. And of course by then, the gear from the dungeon is worse than I what I tend to have at that point.

People really undersell how fast the content came in the first year of Legion. That's one of the reason that Legion, which design-wise was not terribly different from BFA or Shadowlands, felt so good.

There is a really obnoxious antagonism toward queue-able content in wow, which is amazing considering that it is the game that originally pioneered that model.

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It would be great if they could produce content quicker, and I'm sure there are management issues involved in that. Spreading some stuff out more might also help.

But there's no way you could produce content every month unless we're talking about some short quests or other stuff people will burn through in an afternoon.

I remember in 2015ish when swtor was doing monthly chapters for Knights of the Fallen Empire, and basically:
1) they couldn't even keep even that schedule
2) missions were padded with swarms of non-threatening enemies to make them last 60 min instead of 15
3) they abandoned the model the next expansion

Wow probably has 5x+ the resources Bioware Austin did even back then, but there's still no way. The content cadence in Legion required them to sacrifice WoD and mega-crunch to pull it off, I don't think we'll ever see that again.

Monthly is certainly tight, but the Destiny 2 schedule looks something like:

Annual expansion
New season every 3 months
Every season contains about 6 weeks of content drops

FF14 gets out a major patch every 3-4 months and still does smaller ones in between sometimes. Blizzard has been insanely bad at this in an indefensible way.

[Nymrohd]

Monthly is certainly tight, but the Destiny 2 schedule looks something like:

Annual expansion
New season every 3 months
Every season contains about 6 weeks of content drops

FF14 gets out a major patch every 3-4 months and still does smaller ones in between sometimes. Blizzard has been insanely bad at this in an indefensible way.

ESO has a much smaller customer base than FF14 and WoW. We get 4 patches; two come with two dungeons each with usually some QoL feature, a questline and some new dailies. One comes with a very large new zone (that includes 6 delves and two public dungeons), a small raid and usually some larger feature (a new class or profession) and the last one in the year has a smaller zone with its own dailies and a fairly extensive questline (since beyond the zone's own questline it usually caps the annual story as well). We usually also get half a dozen houses plus multiple new styles of furnishing (and an insane number of armor sets).

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How many subscribers does WoW have these days? What you are claiming is that for every 1 million players blizz is making the game for just one hundred of them (0.01%). So that'll be a couple hundred players at best. Blizz cleary is not designing the game around a couple hundred players. Ergo: You are wrong.

Probably why wow only has that many subs left.

[CaptainV]

FFXIV manages a content patch every 3-4 months. I'd like to think Blizzard could do at least something every 4 months. Not saying a raid, but additional questlines at the very least. I also miss getting new dungeons that I can actually queue for when they come out, not months later after the one mega dungeon that was mythic only finally gets split into 2 wings and queueable as heroic. And of course by then, the gear from the dungeon is worse than I what I tend to have at that point.

Imho blizzard shouldnt make the story tied to raiding and instead make raiding as XIV does an entirley optional side content, make the MSQ itself tied to its own vibe of being solo content, especially when they keep trying to push the enphasis your some kind of chosen one.

I frankly dont care if Ions argument is player housing costs a raid tier, good, I never cared, raiding is not my thing nor 99% of the playerbases.

It belongs to a niché group of players who care about that and thats fine, but the majority, dont.

Blizzard should have long ago realized how utterly uninteresting niché content is and instead put more energy into developing content people want, not just what they want.

Id be happy if Dragonflight took an entire year to make, if it came with:

- Vrykul/Dracthyr (Neutral), Kyrian/Venthyr/Sylvaar/Necrolord Abominations. (Neutral Allied Races)
- More customisation.
- Player housing.
- Revamped Vanillia/TBC zones.
- No raid at launch, raids only have 2 difficulties, normal+heroic, normal becomes LFR tier.
- No Mythic dungeons, instead you have heroic+ which is the same thing, less difficulty tiers, more content.
- .1 patch comes with a large optional raid.
- .2 patch is more quality of life content updates.
- .3 patch is another large optional raid.
- .4 patch is more quality of life updates.
- .5 patch is the final raid and end of MSQ.

Id be fine with this, frankly.