9.0 General Discussion

[razorpax]

So after going through social media and multiple fan sites and streams....people still don’t get the covenant system

They don’t understand that you can change them
They come with unique campaigns
You can play together

[Cosmic Janitor]

So after going through social media and multiple fan sites and streams....people still don’t get the covenant system

They don’t understand that you can change them
They come with unique campaigns
You can play together

At least the playing together part is understandable. Afterall the new emissary system is far from intuitive compared to the previous two iterations. I'd argue most people haven't even understood the new emissary/WQ system itself and the new tedium it will bring to everyone's life.. if there was a point to do them, which is kinda up in the air right now past the first 2 weeks.

[TomatoBisque]

So after going through social media and multiple fan sites and streams....people still don’t get the covenant system

They don’t understand that you can change them
They come with unique campaigns
You can play together

pretty much

ignorant people like this screaming about how the system is a disaster but don't know basic facts about it
blizzard sees this and goes "these people complaining don't know basic facts about the system, because they are uninformed their feedback is invalid"
system comes out and has flaws that people knew about but were drowned out by forums complaining about stupid shit

repeat every expansion

[Cosmic Janitor]

pretty much

ignorant people like this screaming about how the system is a disaster but don't know basic facts about it
blizzard sees this and goes "these people complaining don't know basic facts about the system, because they are uninformed their feedback is invalid"
system comes out and has flaws that people knew about but were drowned out by forums complaining about stupid shit

repeat every expansion

As if that was the problem here. The obvious flaws are by design, or do you honestly think blizzard is dumb enough to not being able to differentiate between the high class essays, full blown product documentations and borderline disertations on their beta forums and random shit in private facebook groups? These issues go live because Blizzard chose to ignore them.

[Ersula]

"Forcing" somebody who spends literally the entire encounter boasting about how she manipulated us into doing it for her. Yeah, right. You never even did the fight, did you? The claim is so completely absurd as to make you look like a total moron.

Considering my point was the players are more responsible than Azshara for precisely this reason? I will victim blame all I want if it's being the victim of being a dummy. The faction leaders constantly get tricked by squid people, can you blame anyone for admiring Sylvanas' unequaled competence.

[Sondrelk]

As if that was the problem here. The obvious flaws are by design, or do you honestly think blizzard is dumb enough to not being able to differentiate between the high class essays, full blown product documentations and borderline disertations on their beta forums and random shit in private facebook groups? These issues go live because Blizzard chose to ignore them.

I imagine they can differentiate easily, the problem might be finding them. They probably listen to the official class feedback threads on Battle.net, but beyond that I cannot imagine they look that intently for the hidden gems.

Of course, after they get the good feedback they have to try and figure out contradictions between different reasonable viewpoints and then weigh them up against their own viewpoints and what the game needs as a consumer product.

It is a complicated balancing act that isnt always as easy as just taking the feedback that seems obvious to single people.

[huth]

Considering my point was the players are more responsible than Azshara for precisely this reason? I will victim blame all I want if it's being the victim of being a dummy. The faction leaders constantly get tricked by squid people, can you blame anyone for admiring Sylvanas' unequaled competence.

The players are more responsible for it because Azshara tricked them? That's not a very convincing argument. Azshara still did it on purpose, the PCs were trying to achieve the opposite and had little way of predicting what Azshara was actually planning.

Neither is "getting tricked by people that specialise in it", for that matter.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Is there a point; A bit of gold, some anima you can get elsewhere and maybe gear that post-tf is useless. Haven't gotten any real rep rewards so maybe NYI. And beyond them being tedious to do you also have to go pick them up at your sanctum

That's what I ment. They are just tedious. Not just because the quest themselves got longer (and gimmicky from what I've seen in streams), the whole picking up design.. It's one of these awful concepts that slinked it's way back into the game for no reason during 8.2, all to provide a very thin veneer of "rpg" (system). Then to top it off they kinda lost most of their appeal besides grinding rep (i hope they will at least serve for that .. otherwise they would be even more pointless) in a post-TF world. While I'm all for not making it mandatory for high end characters, I think their purpose for alts and casuals should at least remain.

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I imagine they can differentiate easily, the problem might be finding them. They probably listen to the official class feedback threads on Battle.net, but beyond that I cannot imagine they look that intently for the hidden gems.

Of course, after they get the good feedback they have to try and figure out contradictions between different reasonable viewpoints and then weigh them up against their own viewpoints and what the game needs as a consumer product.

It is a complicated balancing act that isnt always as easy as just taking the feedback that seems obvious to single people.

I mean, that is what community managers are for. If they can't find their feedback (the class discords *caugh*) then they are beyond saving. We aren't talking about modern day luddites though, so I would imagine that they know exactly where they can get their feedback.

[Sondrelk]

I mean, that is what community managers are for. If they can't find their feedback (the class discords *caugh*) then they are beyond saving. We aren't talking about modern day luddites though, so I would imagine that they know exactly where they can get their feedback.

Even when they find hte reasonable discussion there is still the problem of figuring out how to implement it. The game needs to be balanced, and a prerequisite for that is that it stays reasonably similar throughout the process.
Take MM for instance, while it is perfectly reasonable to want the spec to function and pointing out the massive flaws in how it is built it isnt necessarily that easy to rebalance it without breaking it again.

And of course a big problem is I imagine that they might not have enough people working on it at the same time, or worse sharing the class developers instead of having dedicated ones.

[Cosmic Janitor]

And yeah the rewards are nonsense. I appreciate that instead of gold we get cool trash items with flavor text; I am an RPer at heart and I actually read those and prefer selling something that costs 500-600g than getting coins from societies that logically have no concept of aureate remuneration.

I think I would appreciate it more if the story was more consistent (especially with the gameplay), that would immerse me way more. As long as my enchanted god slaying sword, made out of the rarest materials in the cosmos, forged in the divine flames of stars, quenched in the tears of 256 beared virgins and oiled with slyvanas' and Jaina's bathwater, is only worth 70g, 49 silver and 3 copper.. yeah I don't buy why this pearl is worth 600g or why I can't use the divine powers the yellow text claims it holds.

Generally I would love to agree, but I'm also just over my bags coming loose at the seams because of all the grey rubbish that is clogging them up. If it wasn't for mounts with vendors I would have given up on even looting things in the first place.

[Azzurri]

Rumor is they're removing a bunch CD's from the GCD.

[dcc626]

Rumor is they're removing a bunch CD's from the GCD.

yup. should see as number of changes today.

[crusadernero]

Rumor is they're removing a bunch CD's from the GCD.

it was a huge difference for me when they changed this. I remember I heard about it and when I logged in one day to play again after a long break, the gameplay just felt off. Ever since the gameplay has felt off and weird, not how wow were supposed to be.

If they revert the change, i'll be happy.

[TheFirstOnes]

Here's hoping for music and potential Log In screen today.

[dcc626]

That's what I ment. They are just tedious. Not just because the quest themselves got longer (and gimmicky from what I've seen in streams), the whole picking up design.. It's one of these awful concepts that slinked it's way back into the game for no reason during 8.2, all to provide a very thin veneer of "rpg" (system). Then to top it off they kinda lost most of their appeal besides grinding rep (i hope they will at least serve for that .. otherwise they would be even more pointless) in a post-TF world. While I'm all for not making it mandatory for high end characters, I think their purpose for alts and casuals should at least remain.

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I mean, that is what community managers are for. If they can't find their feedback (the class discords *caugh*) then they are beyond saving. We aren't talking about modern day luddites though, so I would imagine that they know exactly where they can get their feedback.

no offense, but the class discords are full of people who all think their classes are horrible. everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.

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it was a huge difference for me when they changed this. I remember I heard about it and when I logged in one day to play again after a long break, the gameplay just felt off. Ever since the gameplay has felt off and weird, not how wow were supposed to be.

If they revert the change, i'll be happy.

they wont be reverting the change entirely. they will be taking a number of things off of it. things that dont make sense being on it in the first place. things that cause massive ramp up for some classes. but they certainly arent just changing things back to the way they were. be happy for whatever we get. although i know thats not going to be the case

[klaps_05]

its funny after all the talk about bring back GCDs and why its "healthy for the game", a lot of them are reverted with the next build. if only someone couldve said GCD changes were bad before...

[Hitei]

Here's hoping for music and potential Log In screen today.

If they're sticking to the norm it's a very high chance, but it's not like they require much testing so who can really say.

[TheFirstOnes]

If they're sticking to the norm it's a very high chance, but it's not like they require much testing so who can really say.

Yeah. Usually the Music/Log In screen pop up like 2 weeks before Pre-patch.

[Sondrelk]

[QUOTE=dcc626;52614676]no offense, but the class discords are full of people who all think their classes are horrible. everything has to be taken with a grain of salt.
/QUOTE]

It is kinda as I mentioned before. Class changes isnt always cut and dry good or bad.

For instance MM is currently pretty hopeless on the PTR, resource generation is off, talents are pointless, you have ot minmax your rotation just so you don't end up with neither wasted resources nor cooldowns.

However the solution to this could be to make Aimed Shot cheaper and faster to move. It could be to replace Rapid Fire with a different ability or even remove it completely. It could be to add previously removed abilities. It could be a complete talent redesign. Or it could be all of the above in some way.

When you come across cases like these it isnt as simple as just looking for well-constructed texts on what the class needs. Personally I always found the problem to be that you cast Aimed Shot too often, therefore a solution would be to massively increase the cooldown. But someone else might think the cooldown should be removed and for it to be cheaper so it can be a filler instead.
In cases like these you could have good well thought out arguments on both sides, in which case Blizzard just has to either pick one and hope it works or try something different.

[Hitei]

its funny after all the talk about bring back GCDs and why its "healthy for the game", a lot of them are reverted with the next build. if only someone couldve said GCD changes were bad before...

I mean they were right though. They said from the very, very start of the GCD changes that players were probably not going to be happy about it. It wasn't a change to make rotations feel really nice, it was a change to combat the tendency to just macro all your damage CDs onto a single button off the GCD, making them basically redundant, and an attempt to make people think moment to moment about what button they want to hit in situations where without the GCD they could just hit multiple things.

They left them in and iterated on them in hopes that players would just get used to them being around again, not because they didn't hear or understand the feedback. But in the end players simply wouldn't move past the change.

It's very similar to flying. They made a change they knew would get backlash, hoped people would just adjust to the reduction in convenience for the sake of gameplay, and then had to adjust when people complained non-stop. Only with flying, most players did move past it, except the group that constantly screeches that they're not going to buy an expansion if it has pathfinder.

It's what people often don't understand about feedback and iteration. They hear feedback, they understand feedback, but just listening to feedback isn't always a good option, because players are very bad at understanding when there should be limits and drawbacks to maintain a working game. They want to be able to do everything and anything as conveniently as possible, and sometimes you have to say "No, try these vegetables" and hope they can deal with them because you can't always feed a child cake.