There needs to be more single player content

[VMSmith]

My point is they give a fuck about what their players want. This one proves it really well.

The devs do not like the dungeon finder? The dungeon finder stays out.

cantrip, my friend, the one suggestion these folk arguing with you have made that rings true, despite the asshole-ish way they present it, is that people like you and me and many many millions of others should drop WoW like a live grenade and gtfo. I get the argument you're making but nothing is going to change and the games is made by jerks for jerks. Blizzard is simply milking players like you for funds to keep the raids going for players like Relapses. So get out, it's what many of us have done and is the only sensible course of action. It can be hard, due to a long-term investment, but once you start spending time with other games and other MMOs you'll soon be glad to be away from this garbage game. And, as a bonus, the more of us that take their request to leave seriously the less funds there will be for "their" game and eventually the raid content and such will dry up.

So you even get a bit of revenge by leaving. Plus, they lose the fun they get of mocking someone who isn't exactly like them, so that's even more of a plus on your side.

I promise you'll be a happier person once you realize that WoW doesn't want you and Blizzard just wants to exploit you to finance what they find fun.

[anon5123]

"there needs to be more single player content in this multiplayer online game"

nice bait

pretty successful too, seeing as you've gotten 29 pages of replies out of it

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Blizzard just wants to exploit you to finance what they find fun.

Now this is some next-level schizoposting.

yeah man, you figured it out, blizzard is pure evil just figuring out new ways to torture players with things they don't like and these people just mindlessly continue paying to play things they don't like

lmfao

[Echo of Soul]

They stop reporting subnumbers because of confirmation bias. It affected thier stocks, when people like you would spam doomsday threads, while completely ignoring the nature of running a company.

They for a fact openly said that subnumbers is not for judging the quality of the game. There are better metrics for that.

Yeah the number of customers doesn't say anything about the quality of your product. If the entire city hates my restaurant but this one guy loves it and comes in every day and buys 100 meals I must make quality food right?

[Unholyground]

This game has needed single player content that was a little more challenging and diverse for a long time.

Guild Wars 2 is a perfect example of how you do content for solo properly.

[rrayy]

That... is totally not how multimillion dollar corporations operate. Don't ever think designers and developers get to spend these budgets without justifying the expenses to the board and the shareholders. Indie developers get to make games that cater to their own tastes, folks like Hazzikotas don't have that kind of luxury.

This is utterly false. The board and shareholders do not care what the game look s like or how it operates, just that it makes money. Ion absolutely has the luxury to make the game cater to his taste and the taste of the team. Stop with that disingenuous nonsense.

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Yeah the number of customers doesn't say anything about the quality of your product. If the entire city hates my restaurant but this one guy loves it and comes in every day and buys 100 meals I must make quality food right?

Nice extreme strawman. How about this one, nobody in city likes it, but peopel come from all over the country because they love it. I guess they still make bad food because nobody in the city liikes it right?

[Caiphon]

This is utterly false. The board and shareholders do not care what the game look s like or how it operates, just that it makes money. Ion absolutely has the luxury to make the game cater to his taste and the taste of the team. Stop with that disingenuous nonsense.

Merely speaking from what I have seen. I've a number of friends in the gaming industry and whenever their game enters a new 'phase' or changes are made to the business model (including target audience, how they will encourage and maintain subscription and transactions etc.) they give these grand presentations in front of the executives explaining how it will be done and how their plan will yield the most profit. I'm sure Ion and co. can decide the theme, plot and gameplay of an expansion but I'd be very, very surprised if it was his call to make the game more 'hardcore' and 'elitist' at the expense of losing subscriptions, which was what the original poster was claiming. It's no secret WoW's subscription has been in a downward curve for a while, the devs (or at least Ion) would have a lot of explaining to do if they were intentionally and exclusively catering to a small minority of the playerbase.

[Relapses]

Merely speaking from what I have seen. I've a number of friends in the gaming industry and whenever their game enters a new 'phase' or changes are made to the business model (including target audience, how they will encourage and maintain subscription and transactions etc.) they give these grand presentations in front of the executives explaining how it will be done and how their plan will yield the most profit. I'm sure Ion and co. can decide the theme, plot and gameplay of an expansion but I'd be very, very surprised if it was his call to make the game more 'hardcore' and 'elitist' at the expense of losing subscriptions, which was what the original poster was claiming. It's no secret WoW's subscription has been in a downward curve for a while, the devs (or at least Ion) would have a lot of explaining to do if they were intentionally and exclusively catering to a small minority of the playerbase.

Long post incoming.

This really got me thinking...

The reality is much more likely that WoW is still ridiculously profitable even without consistently high subscriber figures like it had in the WotLK era. The game likely has much better player retention metrics, too, the game has simply been in decline because after it hit market saturation in WotLK the available pool for people willing to check out the game constricted significantly. The doom and gloom group will always point at WotLK sub numbers and use that as a watermark for WoW's popularity but I'm fairly confident in saying that was the exception not the rule. Very few games achieve the kind of widespread success that WoW had and the fact that it did it with a subscription fee is just a cherry on top. It's pretty unfair to point back at WotLK constantly and say that if WoW isn't continually bringing in 12 million players a quarter that their product is failing. Even at half of that the game is still five times more popular than its next largest contemporary competitor. As such, I'd wager Blizzard relies more on a cyclical revenue model where huge spikes in revenue occur during new expansion and patch releases with less of a focus on how things look in between. It's still a ridiculous license to print money and the built-in sunk cost fallacy keeps even the most cynical anti-Blizzard advocates coming back expansion after expansion.

All this is to say that WoW's success and definition of success have adapted to the changing wants and needs of modern gamers. Players with nostalgia-goggles slapped on their heads so tight they're cutting off oxygen supply to their brain will insist that the old days were better and use the subscriber graphs as proof. It's difficult to parse whether the new approach is better than the old approach but the prevailing notion that Blizzard only needs to go back to the way things used to be for the game to return to its former glory is one of the most easily debunked tropes you see in discussion forums like this. It doesn't help that there are an almost unlimited number of ex-WoW player bad faith actors using what can only be loosely described as conspiracy theories to drive a narrative that Blizzard is motivated only to do things in spite of their playerbase. Using an appeal to popularity, every suggestion is insisted to live or die on the altar of accessibility or ease of engagement. There's no room for error. Players want it and the fact that Blizzard hasn't added it yet is proof they hate their customers. They use this backwards logic to make arguments about how certain features would have broad, universal support and those of us simply asking to keep the status quo are curmudgeony old farts unwilling to accept their vouchsafed, impervious-to-criticism suggestions to make the game better. Single player progression content is the topic here but I've seen the same bad faith argumentation used to support nearly any feature Blizzard does or doesn't choose to include with the game. (Hell, a page ago @cantrip was arguing that Classic Blizzard developers are doing it with their refusal to add the RDF.)

It's all very overwhelming and has a tendency to make any discussion about how to improve WoW incredibly incendiary. Instead of arguing from a neutral standpoint and understanding there are two sides to every story, we start off with the base assumption that Blizzard is wrong and they're intentionally fucking over large swaths of their playerbase for no better reason than because they can. I think this, in part, is why Blizzard wanted to try the community council. While I've seen a lot of the same circlejerky groupthink posted there as it's posted here, at least many of the community council posters try to keep their opinions objective at their core. On forums like this or Reddit, however, we just have people seeking validation for their negative opinions instead of using critical thinking to skills to draft ways to improve the game.

[Lolites]

Seems they are not competent enough to make correct assumptions based on the data then.

yet you think you are competent to make correct assumption WITHOUT the data...

The devs are narrow minded incompetent biased gatekeepers which design the game based on their preferences rather than what the majority would like.

you are VERY naive if you think its devs who make such decisions rather than upper management who care about nothing but money...

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Imagine someone would use numbers for arguments.

people did, but just like you took the INCOMPLETE data and used it as a "weapon", used it do "prove" that their idea which they already decided before is truth, but thats not how reality works...
people leave for milion different reasons, a lot of which have NOTHING to do with the game, but some people would just pretend its bcs of the very specific reason, without giving any thought to thousands of other factors...

[Celement]

Long post incoming.

This really got me thinking...

The reality is much more likely that WoW is still ridiculously profitable even without consistently high subscriber figures like it had in the WotLK era. The game likely has much better player retention metrics, too, the game has simply been in decline because after it hit market saturation in WotLK the available pool for people willing to check out the game constricted significantly. The doom and gloom group will always point at WotLK sub numbers and use that as a watermark for WoW's popularity but I'm fairly confident in saying that was the exception not the rule. Very few games achieve the kind of widespread success that WoW had and the fact that it did it with a subscription fee is just a cherry on top. It's pretty unfair to point back at WotLK constantly and say that if WoW isn't continually bringing in 12 million players a quarter that their product is failing. Even at half of that the game is still five times more popular than its next largest contemporary competitor. As such, I'd wager Blizzard relies more on a cyclical revenue model where huge spikes in revenue occur during new expansion and patch releases with less of a focus on how things look in between. It's still a ridiculous license to print money and the built-in sunk cost fallacy keeps even the most cynical anti-Blizzard advocates coming back expansion after expansion.

All this is to say that WoW's success and definition of success have adapted to the changing wants and needs of modern gamers. Players with nostalgia-goggles slapped on their heads so tight they're cutting off oxygen supply to their brain will insist that the old days were better and use the subscriber graphs as proof. It's difficult to parse whether the new approach is better than the old approach but the prevailing notion that Blizzard only needs to go back to the way things used to be for the game to return to its former glory is one of the most easily debunked tropes you see in discussion forums like this. It doesn't help that there are an almost unlimited number of ex-WoW player bad faith actors using what can only be loosely described as conspiracy theories to drive a narrative that Blizzard is motivated only to do things in spite of their playerbase. Using an appeal to popularity, every suggestion is insisted to live or die on the altar of accessibility or ease of engagement. There's no room for error. Players want it and the fact that Blizzard hasn't added it yet is proof they hate their customers. They use this backwards logic to make arguments about how certain features would have broad, universal support and those of us simply asking to keep the status quo are curmudgeony old farts unwilling to accept their vouchsafed, impervious-to-criticism suggestions to make the game better. Single player progression content is the topic here but I've seen the same bad faith argumentation used to support nearly any feature Blizzard does or doesn't choose to include with the game. (Hell, a page ago @cantrip was arguing that Classic Blizzard developers are doing it with their refusal to add the RDF.)

It's all very overwhelming and has a tendency to make any discussion about how to improve WoW incredibly incendiary. Instead of arguing from a neutral standpoint and understanding there are two sides to every story, we start off with the base assumption that Blizzard is wrong and they're intentionally fucking over large swaths of their playerbase for no better reason than because they can. I think this, in part, is why Blizzard wanted to try the community council. While I've seen a lot of the same circlejerky groupthink posted there as it's posted here, at least many of the community council posters try to keep their opinions objective at their core. On forums like this or Reddit, however, we just have people seeking validation for their negative opinions instead of using critical thinking to skills to draft ways to improve the game.

I think another criminally overlooked fact is wow is a niche game. WoW has impressive numbers...for an mmo.

MMO is the key word there. WoW isn't really on par with box sales as most triple A releases. I don't really get people who want genres to constantly be remixed. You can have elden ring and zelda both be successful while appealing to different audiences.

Trying to reduce gaming into one gray goop of everything being the same seems dull.

[Cynical Asshole]

No, thanks. WoW has enough single player content right now as it is.

An MMO doesn't have the mechanics and features that make up a good single player game. Attempting to play an MMO like a single player game is just stupid boring and pathetic.
The only MMO that tried that is Elder Scrolls Online, and last I heard, it wasn't exactly top 3 MMOs despite Skyrim breaking sale records and still being played 10 years later.

[HansOlo]

This is utterly false. The board and shareholders do not care what the game look s like or how it operates, just that it makes money. Ion absolutely has the luxury to make the game cater to his taste and the taste of the team. Stop with that disingenuous nonsense.

Yeah the number of customers doesn't say anything about the quality of your product. If the entire city hates my restaurant but this one guy loves it and comes in every day and buys 100 meals I must make quality food right?

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Nice extreme strawman. How about this one, nobody in city likes it, but peopel come from all over the country because they love it. I guess they still make bad food because nobody in the city liikes it right?

Before that you have to suggest following:

Is the resturant 18 year old - does the same people come everyday, to eat the same burger menu?
IF NOT - that doesn't mean the resturant is bad. It means that the people are bored and they moved on to some pizza resturant.

That is NOT the same as the resturant is bad. The resturant is still running and they are targeting their specific audiance of burger lovers(and they pay a lot more than the pizza lovers - so it all works out anyway).

Losing my shit. I bet there are kids with better logic, than some of these grown up community members.

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Oh, btw., do not try to engage WatcherDev or TheWindstalker on twitter. Feedback posts to those accounts are being ignored, and they only seem to be operated by PR-folks. You see that on how regularily Hollys account posts classic commercials.

Ion and Holly do not want to be bothered by people outside of their echo chamber.

Probably you guys could try WarcraftDevs on twitter. There you will be ignored by a whole bunch of developer team PR employees.

TBH - I would also ignore you(like many other here). You have nothing constructive.

[HansOlo]

About how much Hazzikostas may decide the design, also from the president of Blizzard entertainment:

Why would the president of a company decide the technicalities of a game? It's like saying Elon Musk should be a car engineer - it's two different responsibilities.

[Relapses]

Thank you for supporting my point. Yes, the high ranks give a shit about how the car, or the game, is designed, as long it brings in money (with an old game as WoW they seem to be happy about every penny, while they could make dollars). The developers, the game director and his team in this case, are the ones who decide.

If WoWs revenue drops to zero, it is likely they replace Hazzikostas. But i am sure he will always find enough casual gamers to sell tokens for boosts to. Just sell another shop mount and the shareholders are happy enough.

While good design could make the game have way more players for way longer. But here we are. With Ion. And his design bias for mythic dungeons and premade group raids.

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my most favourite twitter post from ybarra:



https://twitter.com/Qwik/status/1432432835873296384

Why are you obsessing over Ybarra's Twitter now? In the tweet you referenced he's literally fending off players who constantly @ him for shit he has absolutely no part in. What the fuck do you want him to say? "Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I'm going to fire Ion immediately if he doesn't add the RDF to Classic tomorrow!"

[Relapses]

Oh i am just having fun with being right about who is in charge for WoW.

And yes, i want Hazzikostas to be fired based on how much he fucked up the last expansions. Including Dragonflilght.

You don't even have a very strong argument for firing him. You've just blindly associated his name with all the bad things in WoW and think that removing him will mysteriously resolve all of the problems the game has. This has been the MO for dogshit WoW takes since the beginning of time. Before Ion, it was Chilton. Before Chilton, it was GC. Before GC it was Kaplan and crew. And if Ion ever leaves, the minute the devs fail to design the game precisely the way you think it should be designed I'm sure you'll be quick to construct various conspiracy theories about how the WoW deep state and a shadowy cabal hellbent on maximum player dissatisfaction is in charge. Personally, I don't always fully agree with the smarmy way Ion delivers information to the community but you can tell the man clearly cares a lot about this game and the way it's perceived by its fans. I can't think of a better figurehead for the game though I do feel kind of bad that he has bear the brunt of low-IQ takes from players who have no idea what his job description actually entails.

[Lolites]

Oh i am just having fun with being right about who is in charge for WoW.

you have NEVER worked in any high position, have you? it seems very clear...

being in charge of creating the "thing" (in this case game) =/= being in charge who is your target audience
yes, Ion might make decisions about game, but if you think NOBODY above him (and i dont mean Ybarra, he is small fish relatively speaking) would tell him "well according to every data we have solo players are majority of our playerbase, make the game for them or you are fired" then you are EXTREMELY childishly naive...

you might bet your ass acti-bliz high management knows well what they are doing when it comes to financial decisions...
despite what people here (most of which obviously never worked anything above cash register at Tesco) might think, managers are not idiots, they want profitable game bcs very often their very own salary depends on it... so WHY ON EARTH would they let Ion (and people in charge before him) drive the game into the ground by making game for people who are "noticeable minority" if there is such clear majority in different area?!

[Relapses]

I have. The argument is he could create a game for millions to stay longer rather than a game for thousands.



Not blindly. Actually, Hazzikostas in in charge and reponsible as i proved with Qwiks twitter posts. He is the one responsible for WoWs design. On behalf of the president of Blizzard Entertainment.



Chilton was before GC. GC never was game director, just systems lead designer. The good thing about Street was he had a real wish to communicate with his audience. Unlikely to those which are in charge nowadays. Just imagine anyone could contradict their tunnel vision. Hazzikostas in shambles!



You might not have noticed it yet (just take a deep breath and reread qwiks statements) but it is no conspiracy theory that Hazzikostas is in charge for the game. Well, and i really would be way too busy drinking all that champagner if Hazzikostas was fired / left. That would be a way too great day to waste it with reasoning why. I think he simply should leave himself, as that is the best thing that could happen to everyone of us.



He cares a lot about his playstyle. He does not care about the majority of players. Which is quite some problem in an AAA MMORPG which is meant to adress as many players as possible (= mission statement blizzard entertainment).

Who the fuck was even arguing that Ion wasn't in charge of WoW? Nobody in this thread is belaboring this point and you're linking Tweets from Qwik like you've just uncovered the lost catacombs of Egypt. Meanwhile anybody with a reading level above that of a 3rd grader was already clued in ages ago. (Hint: Most of us can read Ion's job description.) It doesn't change the fact that removing Ion wouldn't suddenly make WoW a less group-focused game. Whomever replaces Ion will surely uphold the same values the game has had since Day One. And one of those values is a focus on group content. This isn't Ion twisting his nipples and saying "Oh, you want SiNgLe PlAyEr CoNtEnT, huh? Toooooooo bad." This whole thing reeks of frankly weird magical thinking on your part that somehow the masses will rise up military coup style then storm Blizzard HQ and defenestrate Ion from the third story into a nearby dumpster.

Moreover, this idea that if your idea isn't addressed specifically by a WoW dev that they're intentionally ignoring you has to die. There are so many conflicting desires from within the WoW community that if we held the onus on the developers to address every single one of them they'd be spending 99% of their time drafting handwritten responses to people whose' major complaint is that Sylvanas' G-string was five pixels too thick in a recent FMV. They'd be doing this instead of, y'know, actually developing the fucking game.

Think this through man. Please.

[Lolites]

He cares a lot about his playstyle. He does not care about the majority of players. Which is quite some problem in an AAA MMORPG which is meant to adress as many players as possible (= mission statement blizzard entertainment).

the reality itself proves you are talking bullshit...
you do realise under ion we got MORE content in open world, solo/group non raiding pve content, and pve alternative progresion paths to raids since the begining of the game, right?
WQ, legion invasions and similar events, all of argus and every zone added in patches after, visions, islands, warfronts, torghast, campaigns, mision table, pet battle dungeons, M+ was all done under Ion, who somehow is focused on raids only... what was open world content before legion? daily quests, rares (ironicaly, very rarely) and... that was it... instanced pve? raids and that was it, scenarios briefly in MOP...

visions are btw great example of your "majority" - it was soloable content that rewarded "bis" items (highest ilvl and corrupted) how many people finished it? well according to YOUR source, 24% (25% for orgrimmar)... so much for majority...

https://www.dataforazeroth.com/colle...n-of-stormwind

[Echo of Soul]

Nice extreme strawman. How about this one, nobody in city likes it, but peopel come from all over the country because they love it. I guess they still make bad food because nobody in the city liikes it right?

Number of customers are a good indicator of how good a game is. No strawman no matter how moronic is going to convince anyone that less people playing is somehow better than more people playing, it's really fucking stupid to think so.

[Amariw]

the reality itself proves you are talking bullshit...
you do realise under ion we got MORE content in open world, solo/group non raiding pve content, and pve alternative progresion paths to raids since the begining of the game, right?
WQ, legion invasions and similar events, all of argus and every zone added in patches after, visions, islands, warfronts, torghast, campaigns, mision table, pet battle dungeons, M+ was all done under Ion, who somehow is focused on raids only... what was open world content before legion? daily quests, rares (ironicaly, very rarely) and... that was it... instanced pve? raids and that was it, scenarios briefly in MOP...

visions are btw great example of your "majority" - it was soloable content that rewarded "bis" items (highest ilvl and corrupted) how many people finished it? well according to YOUR source, 24% (25% for orgrimmar)... so much for majority...

https://www.dataforazeroth.com/colle...n-of-stormwind

Donnu what ion is responsible or not, i think its shortsighted to assume he's the main or only factor in these sort of things, but to answer the bolded part, MoP had Thundering and Timeless Isles, some of the best solo pve content wow had. Its also the expansion which added pet battles iirc.

WoD zones were lacking but at least plentiful and with elites. Outdoor combat became more stale and less freestyle since Legion.

[Lolites]

MoP had Thundering and Timeless Isles, some of the best solo pve content wow had.

i mean, its not like it had something new, rares and dailies... it was great at the time, if something like that was released today people would complain about "empty patch"...
pet battles sure, that was just developed further with pb dungeons under Ion afaik, tbh i dont really care about pet battles