What was BFA’s target audience?

[Jtbrig7390]

There is no logic in that.

There is no logic in a childish insult, Its just you spewing toxic shit because your argument failed.

Its ok to be wrong and admit when you are, that is called being a adult.

[Dakara]

I’d suggest they tried to target multiple audiences with such varied content and gearing paths....

....then they ruined it for everyone by tying all those different content paths together with AP, AZ Traits & Essences.

No, a Heroic raider isn’t forced to grind out a Max level neck and Blood of the Enemy essence even its BiS but most players in any form of organised group content like to feel they’re pulling their weight and having BiS “power upgrades” scattered all over various content types clearly aimed at different groups of players is bad design.

[SkagenRora]

If you treat it like a job - then it probably sucked.

If any one is "A head" of you in progression, that means you are behind and need to catch up.. It's not "Treating it as a job" if you just don't want to be behind other players.. Those who can't keep up get benched in raids.

[Frolo Bobbins]

If any one is "A head" of you in progression, that means you are behind and need to catch up.. It's not "Treating it as a job" if you just don't want to be behind other players.. Those who can't keep up get benched in raids.

That's also a you problem.

[schwarzkopf]

If any one is "A head" of you in progression, that means you are behind and need to catch up..

Indeed - when WoW is a job, you have to be at peak performance. There is nothing wrong with that choice - but BfA isn't build for those who treat it as a job.

If you use the word 'need' then you are talking about a job. I have a job because I need money, I do my work tasks because I need to do them to keep my job.

I don't NEED the awesome mount of Rustfeather, but I do WANT it ... so I wonder over to his spawn point every so often because I WANT to.

[SkagenRora]

Indeed - when WoW is a job, you have to be at peak performance. There is nothing wrong with that choice - but BfA isn't build for those who treat it as a job.

If you use the word 'need' then you are talking about a job. I have a job because I need money, I do my work tasks because I need to do them to keep my job.

I don't NEED the awesome mount of Rustfeather, but I do WANT it ... so I wonder over to his spawn point every so often because I WANT to.

I use the word "Need" because Guild Leader/officer and other members judge whatever you do.. If you don't keep up you will eventually be tossed aside for someone who puts out better numbers.

It's not "Need" by choice, But "Need" to keep other people from replacing you.

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That's also a you problem.

If you are behind other players, the players who are evaluating your every performance and action will eventually replace you with something else if you can't keep up.

You don't force yourself to keep up because you enjoy it, You do it to please other people so you aren't tossed aside.

[Mysterymask]

You don't force yourself to keep up because you enjoy it, You do it to please other people so you aren't tossed aside.

.....this is still a video game you're talking about right...I mean you don't get payed to play wow...Ion doesn't send you meals everyday and pay your rent right? I mean at the end of the day this is a VIDEO GAME used for ENTERTAINMENT

there's a point where you have to ask "am I being entertained"......if the answers no then the GAME is not doing its job

[SkagenRora]

.....this is still a video game you're talking about right...I mean you don't get payed to play wow...Ion doesn't send you meals everyday and pay your rent right? I mean at the end of the day this is a VIDEO GAME used for ENTERTAINMENT

there's a point where you have to ask "am I being entertained"......if the answers no then the GAME is not doing its job

The work place is the raid, the guild Leader/officers are your Employers and raid spot is the payment for your work.

The fun is getting the loot.

[Mysterymask]

The guild Leader/officers are your Employers and raid spot is the payment for your work.

The fun is getting the loot.

so after a long day of doing it at work I come home to do it in a video game so that I may be rewarded with jpegs with slightly bigger numbers?

yyeeeah I'm good

[SkagenRora]

so after a long day of doing it at work I come home to do it in a video game so that I may be rewarded with jpegs with slightly bigger numbers?

yyeeeah I'm good

Raid and especially progression raiding has never been "fun" for me, but since blizz has yet to implement P2progress or P2W Then raids is the only way to gear up and thus why you need to do it.

Dono why you would do any thing at all in the game if better gear/higher numbers mean nothing to you

[Mysterymask]

Raid and especially progression raiding has never been "fun" for me, but since blizz has yet to implement P2progress or P2W Then raids is the only way to gear up and thus why you need to do it.

Dono why you would do any thing at all in the game if better gear/higher numbers mean nothing to you

kinda why I quit playing semi seriously long ago....mostly play as "Do I have enough gear to reliably kill stuff in lower raids for mounts and occasionally do some outdoor content for whatever i can unlock" The raid mentality just sorta drained on me and I just lost the ability and want to have to schedule time to play a video game with people. Don't get me wrong I can play video games for a long time still sure hell I just played Persona 5 for like 6 hours. You know what the difference is? Wife needs something I can get up and do it. We wanna do something I can stop and do it. I don't have to rely on other people to have fun with this game. Yeah there is some work for the best gear but I actually have FUN doing it. I can't fathom doing a bunch of crap I find not fun in order to do the stuff that is fun. I find clearing old raids fun. I find helping my wife doing some random stuff outside kinda fun. Hell i found raiding semi seriously back in the day fun....but crap the stuff some of yall do to try to be top of the top..cant even think fathom it anymore.

[Ange]

so after a long day of doing it at work I come home to do it in a video game so that I may be rewarded with jpegs with slightly bigger numbers?

yyeeeah I'm good

This is the only way to play the game, you have to think in relative terms about the things people say about their motivation for the game. Some people play very short in this endless MMO, while other play it regularly. The personal goals for each type of player cant be the same for this simple reason.

Anything said about hardcore areas in this game from players with very limited playtime should be taken with a grain of salt. The Point Of View of those players is so narrow, that they simply can't and won't see in relative terms.

[Jazzhands]

Raid and especially progression raiding has never been "fun" for me, but since blizz has yet to implement P2progress or P2W Then raids is the only way to gear up and thus why you need to do it.

Dono why you would do any thing at all in the game if better gear/higher numbers mean nothing to you

You can pay for raid/m+ carries, by buying tokens with real money. Plenty of gear with no actual raiding involved.

There's also a lot of things to do in game that don't involve getting higher numbers. My gear is about as good as it'll get this patch, but I still do m+ simply because it's fun. It's odd to me that you go after gear when you don't enjoy the activity that you use it in.

[kaminaris]

They have. They've demonstrated this often. The problem here is that their feedback loop is aprox. 2 years long, because they only implement big changes/new features/class overhauls in major x.0 releases. And somehow they think it's not worth talking about anything else but major releases at Blizzcon.

Their releases move in such a glacial pace, the forums have already resigned to "Blizzard doesn't listen" and a year later they implement the feedback collected in 2017.

That doesn't really work with modern "Internet time" where people except reply within 5 minutes or it's a "total joke lol". Trying to explain this and make their feedback loop seem "alive" is one of their biggest challenges - but it doesn't seem like they're too concerned about this.

Dev watercooler blogs are gone. Q&A videos never talk about design decisions (and they're really hard to search for information). They collect, they evaluate, they implement - but it's a long loop.

D&D Beyond does fantastic modern feedback loop out open on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?lis...H8u6rqyQVZ5YSN

I wish more gaming companies would do this

Oh man, you are almost nearly right. Except there is one thing I know: forums are kinda not good place to collect feedback. Especially in the state we have now.
Imagine them reading 1000 long threads.

But the thing you showed, those D&D Beyond is truly fantastic, wish wow had such thing.

[Frolo Bobbins]

If you are behind other players, the players who are evaluating your every performance and action will eventually replace you with something else if you can't keep up.

You don't force yourself to keep up because you enjoy it, You do it to please other people so you aren't tossed aside.

Yes indeed. There's nothing wrong turning the game into a job, if you enjoy it.
But turning it into a job is a choice you make, as you're making above. That's fine. It's your call.

But it's also your call to jump off the hamster wheel if you don't enjoy it anymore.

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Oh man, you are almost nearly right. Except there is one thing I know: forums are kinda not good place to collect feedback. Especially in the state we have now.
Imagine them reading 1000 long threads.

Yep, their collection method sucks and is very prone to misunderstandings. Agreed.

[Soon-TM]

I've tried doing IE's a few times this expansion, everytime they ended in everyone leaving, and I never even understood the purpose or goal of them..

Tbh I don't think Blizzard does either...

[Casperite]

On the contrary, I'd say the audience is people who don't give much of a fuck about all this crap you mention. For casuals without this weird mentality of "I HAVE to do it", the expansion isn't grindy at all (or, at least, not more so than past expansions).

Essences? The base ones are pretty easy to acquire even with minimum amount of effort (rep/HoA level), as for the others (raid/m+/pvp), if you play the content that requires them, you will get them sooner or later, if you don't play the content that requires them, you don't need them, and shouldn't care.

I wouldn't call IEs "required" content, unless you're one of the most hardcore players that seriously pushes mythic raids. And if you're one of those people, then you're probably used to having to do a lot of mindless/boring/trivial content to get 0.0001% edge over others. And while the "boring" part is certainly on the content, the "required" part is on the player. You can opt out of doing islands, and you won't really be THAT far behind, especially later on in the patch. Sure, at the START of the patch, where ppl are rushing to unlock their essence slots, islands are definitely useful/mandatory, but after that...nope.

I fail to see how lack of tiers was bad for XMOG.

Gearing looked that way for quite a while now, it's not exactly a BfA thing. When your gear is shit, you get upgrades fast, and sooner or later you reach a certain point when getting upgrades is almost impossible, at least without some lucky titanforges. If you're gambling/addicted sort of person, then you will keep running trivial content hoping for luck. If you're a sane person, you will see that wasting countless hours for +2 overall ilvl is...well, not exactly sane. It is what it is, some like it, some don't, but once again - not a BfA thing, so.

100% agree. What most here seem to fail to realize is that casuals do not need to grind everything out cause casuals are not doing raids, at least not heroic and mythic. I find the game very alt friendly now. I do not need all my alts to be bis. That is just silly when I don't even raid normal difficulty. Barely even do LFR cause I find raiding in general to be boring.

[kaminaris]

The players that enjoyed Legion. It was, in some ways, a miss because it was systemically it was too much like Legion.

@kaminaris
It's nearly impossible to respond well to feedback when you're locking down a feature-complete version of the next expansion while the current one still has a year to run.

How is that impossible? When customers don't like some feature, blizzard should try to improve it, but not half year later, just a bit faster.
I mean, they are not going to scrap covenants at this point BUT even on blizzcon it didn't really take genius to figure out potential issues, just like when we first had garrison we all knew how it was going to end.

Garrisons and WoD is prime example of what happens when you:
1. Ignore people feedback
2. Have too much pride and stick to your ideas till the end.

This is the nature of how slow Blizzard is to bring products to completion. Any real thoughtful feedback that requires serious system changes isn't going to make it into any product until expansion-after-next. Story, art, anything that requires serious coding, all of that is at the very least on a two-year lead time.

I'm well aware it takes very long time but this is absolutely terrible for business. Not everything is like that, for example it took them way to long (till last patch) to fix legiondaries. BUT they did fix azerite gear in patch *.1 (it was pretty obvious from the start that having random azerite drops from chests is going to be bad idea).

So they can act quicker, just the will is missing.

Yeah, some things can be done more quickly but their code is loaded to the gills with opportunities for unintended consequences so it takes years for user feedback to work its way into the base code. So that third portion of the feedback loop may not be missing but may be delayed for so long that it can look that way.

Frankly after seven years here and longer on the Blizz boards the quality of user feedback is so bad and the desires of such a large set of players so contradictory that they're better off ignoring all of it. Raids work very well because in reality the initial design for mythic is set up for 1%-3% of all players.

Oh and this is something I have been saying for a year. Forums is not a place to collect feedback. Cause its mostly uneducated blabbering of people with narrow horizons. Blizzard needs a heavily moderated environment suited for collecting feedback, such as open ticket system.

[Niwes]

Expansion is too grindy for casuals (has been improved a little bit though).

Essence system makes it terrible for alts.

“Required” content like IEs were far too mundane for hardcore players.

Lack of tier sets was bad for xmog.

Gearing progression is screwed up. You get a lot of pieces all at once and then it can take forever to get an upgrade. BIS is essentially dead.

Seriously, BFA’s target audience may very well be people who like to make spreadsheets or run endless sims on raid bots.

thats a great question. and i think also blizz themselfes have no appropriate answer.

[Naiattavain]

god damn bfa sucked ass. legion just made me think about how much time i wasted on this stupid game.