The amount of complaining on is starting to get quite silly.

[ClassicPeon]

That's again standard "If you don't share my opinion, then automatically you're troll and should be banned to make site X better". Overall it's about lacking real constructive counter-arguments to beat your opponent and calling moderators to do it for you, i.e. just mute this opinion. Define this "better" please? It's common misconception. Forums are for discussion. And discussion means having different opinions. If all players here would be fans, nothing would be to discuss. And forum would automatically turn into news board, where we will have 100500 "Great change!!! Can't wait!!!!" under every news.

Greatest example of anti-hating? Removal of flying. Blizzard said "We want immersion". Everybody parroted it. "We don't want you to kill boss before killing his guards blah blah blah". But is no-flying really about immersion? Does Blizzard actually care about immersion, if at the same time they, for example, implement things like CRZ, that actually kills "fantasy world" feeling and clearly shows, that you play broken game - not live in fantasy world? Now it's obvious for everybody, that removal of flying is about slowing players down and making game casual/alt unfriendly. So, wasn't it mob mentality?

It has nothing to do with opinion. It has everything to do with people stating opinions as facts and then refusing to argue them after they have been stated.

Its people white knighting or people being just borderline insane on what motives blizzard has.

I'm not sure why you think i'm dumb enough to fall for your "lets put words into his mouth and act like thats what he says" traps. Does it work when you argue with other people in here?

Why dont you try and argue against what i say instead of making up shit to argue against?

[Tarba]

I know if I get any response to this it will most likely be a lot of backfire because I am basically attacking a portion of the community, however this has starting to get very frustrating. I have been thinking a lot on this subject lately and I first thought it would come nothing good out of adressing it, but increasingly I feel the need to push back against this sillyness. I love this game so much and I would love to come on here to talk about awesome things, but I find myself very distracted by negativity which doesn't hold any water, most of the time.

So what am I really talking about? Well first of I need to mention that have high-functioning autism and that is somewhat relevant because I despise people as a collective (not in their individual components of course, I love spending time with certain people). Watching people from a distance behaving in groups is very interesting to me and something that always worries me. People have a tendency to rally behind negativity, not just in gaming but in general. Thats why we have riots and people march. Though some marches have good intentions and outcomes.

There is also this concept of content creators and the fact that negativity and controversy attract more attention. This feeds into this feedback loop which is very addicting to content creators. This is a huge factor of what is driving this negativity and the complaining and its speaks against its validity. Also, coming with negativity or critisism in general, not just regarding to World of Warcraft, have a tendency to make you appear as a more intelligent and sophisticated person. If you are complaining about something, you show that you have put effort into things, analyzed and made up your intelligent conclusion. Though this is hardly the case. On the other hand, if you are positive about something, you are just this somewhat ignorant gullable person who accepts anything at face value and probably is very forgiving and naive. I would say that is most often not the case at all.

So back to my autism thingy and how I don't like people in groups. When I see people even in a minority behave in a certain way I have a tendency to go the opposite direction and wonder why they are behaving in such a way. What is the reason behind it.

Evaluating the common complaints recently I find that 90% of the time they have no real proper reasoned arguments behind them and frankly if I might be so bold, say that they seem coming from posters that haven't made up their own arguments, but following a script. The sentences are formulated the same way and if there are more arguments behind it, it sounds equally the same. Now, that itself doesn't make an argument wrong. People could be posting from a script like mindless bots and come with accurate information. This just doesn't seem to be the case about issues related to recent issues people discuss.

Now, I know its provoking for me to reduce most opinions down to people just parroting others statements or like posting from a script, however that is how it appears to me and I am still open to a nuanced discussion around critisism from people who have put a lot of thought into their own arguments. However that is not what I see most of the time, though it happens from time to time.

Also I can watch a youtube or streamer with a lot of followers, and lo and behold, the next day I see people write exactly the same complaint, word for word in comment section on youtube and even here. I even saw many comments yesterday on Youtube to a specific video adressing class balance and people were writing "Oh I was so hyped for Shadowlands, but after watching this, I can't play this expansion after all" People will ACTUALLY accept a youtubers subjective opinion on something as gospel instead of trying the game for themselves.

I am going to adress the most recent complaint, but there are many of them like "BFA was garbage", "Covenants will fail". I would say both these statements are exaggurated and false. And the reality is far more nuanced. So I will only adress the most recent one for now.

The newest thing to complain about now is what has been refered to as "borrowed power". This has always existed, though at a lesser extent. We used to borrow legendaries and set bonuses from tier sets, leaving them behind as we went into new content. The argument is that Blizzard should stop making these systems and move them into talents and abilities and even spend more time working on balance.

These systems are a solution to a problem which was rightly complained about. Introducing new talents and abilities over several expansions gave us so many abilities that Blizzard decided to prune them. And we know how that was recieved. Making new abilities based on the theme of the expansion is a way to solve this issue. When it comes to balance then I think according to looking at warcraftlogs, the game has never been more balanced. But people are so obsessed with being optimal in every situation and never being at an disadvantage that even the 3% difference is unbearable to some people.

Another argument is that Blizzard should keep the systems going into new expansions. If that was a good idea then in Shadowlands we would spend 90% of our time in our garrisons, with legendary ring from MoP, having artifact weapons with 2000 Concordance of Legionfall, Azerite Armor with 6 rings, 20 legendary essences, 8 corruption effects, legendary cloak, covenant abilities, souldbinds, crafted legendaries having 90 different passive effects and procs going of all the time and you become this death machine with 140% haste all the time.

I am exaggurating a bit, but you have to see that this is not a good solution. Borrowed power is the best annoying solution compared to the alternatives.

Also I feel more and more sympathy for the developers of the game. They spend 10 hours a day or so, underpaid under bad conditions working on systems they now they must change in the future anyway because feedback from the usual suspects dictates so, just to come home and trying to connect with the community and they read posts that they should be fired and don't care about the game. It's a miracle we even have a game to log into at this point.

I will stop there for now and apologize this was a bit long. I have a lot more to say about this and since I have basically offended half of the people that post here, I guess I will have the opportunity to adress more issues if this is turning out something people are willing to discuss.

Most of the complaints were legitimates.
Garison were a lame excuse of housing. Instead of making the housing part better, they stoped improving it. But it was still central to every thing in wod. Emptying the world and hubs. That's exactly what people complained about. You could literaly farm resources in it...
What did they do about that dev? they just put it in the trash can. While it still had potential if they had actually read feedback.
Most new systems they introduce are a mess. People complain about it during beta, retards say "it's just beta wait and see", it goes live still broken and get badly fixed 2 patchs later. While introducing another dumb thing.
Legion legendaries were completely unbalanced. At start, if you got one you had way less chances to get another one. So one guy would have the awesome legendary, and you got the useless one making you completely randomly uncompetitive. The increased bad luck to get a legenday was fixed later. And the ability to target the one you wanted came up with the last patch. Sounds familiar? Yep, they did the same in bfa.
Borowed power, why not? The problem is, without them, you are clunky as hell. They also get nerfed after some times on live of course, cause when people complain about it on beta it's not fixed. So you farm a specific borowed power that might get nerfed, who knows?
Island expeditions are literally just a fast aoe zone.No exploration at all, just get as much mobs as you can, and aoe. What's the point of that?
Flying : I'm pro "not flying into new content until next patch". Still, designing zones arounf flying is freaking dumb. Farming nazjatar was absolutely a disgusting experience. The problem is mostly the lack of alternative. Traveling the world gets quickly boring. Being able to climb and glide easily would help.
Also main lore is basically written for 8 years old and has the quality level of any random bad tv show episode.

Feedbacks are actually pretty great. Many explain what is bad, why, and how fix it. Blizzard don't care about those constructive feedbacks and do their routine :
Implement new frustative system. Make it unbalanced with a lot of boring farm, so people will get rewards but not the one they want so they still have to farm. Once people are bored enought by it, fix it by making it slightly less retarded so people come back. And add a new boring farm system.

[Alkizon]

I'd like to sincerely sympathize with them, but their audience and state of community is reflection of their work (and this doesn't even matter if it in/out-side the game), so they're receiving exactly as much as they deserved, no more and no less.

ps. Haven't read thread, but condemn it, since is useless one. Whine about whine, nothing original.

[LostLocket]

I don't think cutting corners is exactly the right word. Creating new complex systems each expansion while keeping up dungeons and raids developments is more ambitious and requires more work than tweaking some base class abilities and adding a few set bonuses.

They aren't cutting corners but they might be to ambitious to be able to balance it all. I know that people are parroting the "sl is the most ambitious expansion? LOL". They seem to conflate ambitious with it they like it or not though.

I can see where you are coming from but given the lack of proper testing and balancing seen with these systems (either from lack of ability or lack of time the result is the same) this ambition isn't a healthy one.

If these systems didn't have such massive throughput effects on every class and spec to the point they force harmonization they would be interesting. As it stands now you will see each spec being 80% of one covenant if not more as players migrate to what is effective over what isn't.

The reality of how the system will work makes it seem more like a gimmick then it does any kind of well developed system.

[Thenadrys]

Honestly, it's not about politics. Peoples opinions on them are beside the point. Complaining about companies doing lip service to the latest trend is fair game.

What is really tiring I think is the *manner* in which these things happen. Not with thoughtful or constructive criticism but just straight up foul behavior. Don't get me wrong. People should have the right to be asses. I just wish fewer people would exercise that right and try to be a little constructive instead.

[Kumorii]

I can see where you are coming from but given the lack of proper testing and balancing seen with these systems (either from lack of ability or lack of time the result is the same) this ambition isn't a healthy one.

If these systems didn't have such massive throughput effects on every class and spec to the point they force harmonization they would be interesting. As it stands now you will see each spec being 80% of one covenant if not more as players migrate to what is effective over what isn't.

The reality of how the system will work makes it seem more like a gimmick then it does any kind of well developed system.

Absolutely. I think that's a problem as well. However if people say "this ain't ambitious" because they don't like it. What signal does that send? They should be more ambitious because this wasn't enough. Etc etc.

It's a problem with a lot fo critique in which people aren't clear or make hyperbolic statements that detract from what they actually mean. This is where the parroting and forming your own opinion comes in. You can come to same conclusion as someone else but unless you didn't get there yourself you don't really know why nor can you explain the reasoning behind it. Thus giving feedback that can backfire on what you really want.

[LostLocket]

Absolutely. I think that's a problem as well. However if people say "this ain't ambitious" because they don't like it. What signal does that send? They should be more ambitious because this wasn't enough. Etc etc.

It's a problem with a lot fo critique in which people aren't clear or make hyperbolic statements that detract from what they actually mean. This is where the parroting and forming your own opinion comes in. You can come to same conclusion as someone else but unless you didn't get there yourself you don't really know why nor can you explain the reasoning behind it. Thus giving feedback that can backfire on what you really want.

Makes sense. Most of the feedback I can give from the beta likely isn't feedback that will ever be acted on. Personally I would like to see wow return to a more casual game design. What I mean by this is something closer to tbc were how quickly you could " Complete" the game mostly rested on your ability to play with grinds working to supplement character progression not fuel it.

I would like to see any reward in wow from any power system be available through difficult content instantly if you are capable of pulling it off. Take artifact power. If artifact power capped at level... lets say 100 for simplicities sake. I would want completing a mythic +20 to be worth 20% of the overall grind for the patch with mythic raid boss kills granting 5% then toning down the numbers from there.

I have no real desire to even see these kinds of systems in the game. I would rather all these long term grinds simply become the passives you earned instantly on level cap like they were prelegion and all the power of a class stemming from the class itself then supplemented by gear. I highly dislike that the lionshare of my classes damage now (going by sims roughly 75% once you account for essences,azerite,corruptions and how they amplify stats) comes from secondary progression systems.

TLDR: I highly dislike fill the bar gameplay.

[Tesshin20]

Yes, his point of view is mostly from the mythic raiding community because that's where has the most knowledge and firsthand experience in. But if you would watch his videos, you would see the constant reminder of his POV and that for more casual players, the things he talks about aren't a big deal. This message is in almost every single SL beta video he has made.
That's why I said in my initial post in this thread, if you want to inform yourself about the current situation in SL and would like to get an opinion from content creators, you should trust and pick the creator that best represents your view on the game. If you want a more casual look on the game, you have people like Taliesin&Evitel, Hazelnuttygames and others that better suit your style.

With your comment about balance I don't think you read my post in this thread some pages ago. Even if you and a good amount of the community aren't playing to compete against each other, balance in multiplayer games is always important. You can look at the faction imbalance in raiding to see the consequences of yearlong neglected imbalance. While at first only mattering to the raiding community, it evolves more in more to a serverwide discrepancy which leads to terrible open world PvP and ganking, mass server exodus and dead realms. If blizzard would be as negligent with class balance as they were with racials in the past, players would more and more flock to the better classes organically without being forced.
You can observe this to some extend right now with Demon Hunters. Although the newest class introduced into the game, DH quickly rose to the top of the played classes because of its dominance in pvp and pve. Luckily, they will get nerfed in SL after largely being left alone during Legion and BFA which will decrease their numbers hopefully. But if this wasn't the case, other melee specs would be left in the dust in favor of demon hunters (which already happened with WW Monks and DKs).
WW Monks are arguably one of the most fun melee dps specs in the game right now. If your logic would be correct and to the average player fun is more important than balance, they would be at the top. However, this is not observable at all which leads me to believe that even for the most casual, non-competitive players, a certain amount of performance is still required for the enjoyment of a spec.

As most people like preach and players of echo, limit etc already pointed out, the competitive side of the playerbase for the most part won't be effected by convoluted restrictions. It will be annoying, but they will find a way to overcome them and take the necessary time do to so. The average player however won't have this kind of commitment and time and will be severely hampered by them, creating a more toxic environment and unsatisfied playerbase.

At the end of the day, I think we have to agree to disagree on our perspectives on the game and that's fine. But as the more competitive community, it is very tiring to constantly get shafted by changes exclusively targeted at mythic, high M+ or high PvP players that don't matter in the slightest to the more casual players (GCD, Restrictions to gear swapping during M+, Master looter, Borrowed Power systems that play the game for you). That's why we can't be optimistic about the upcoming expansion from a gameplay standpoint because it will be a hassle to jump through blizzards artificially created and unnecessary hoops.

I do agree and sympethize with the competitive part of the playerbase that the covenant system can be a huge annoyance. However my main point with this thread it's not so much that there will be balance or not, but that some people that are very vocal assume that what matters to Preach, will matter to them as well to the same extent just because they look up to him.

Its this "sheep mentality" for a lack of better word I regard as the problem. For all I know, I could be wrong and Preach and his followers could be right, but that is not the main point. The point is that I have (as far I as know) come to my own conclusion, while SOME of his followers have not.

I find these hoops and how they affect our gameplay makes the game interesting. I think it comes down to what reason do you have to play the game and what you want out from it.

[melzas]

Why? What's wrong with complaining about the parts you dislike and would like to see changed? That's called "feedback" and is the only real way players have to get those things changed. Quitting doesn't make the game better, it just means you decided that the good parts no longer make up for the bad parts.

I think you answered your own quesion, really.

Feedback is fine but what I'm talking about is a very common on these boards plain old bashing/complaining - rude, lacking substance, bitching about things that are totally subjective and so on.

If someone is paying for the game to play it and then goes on the forums making threads about how he hates current wow, then Im not sure it's feedback. It's some form of mental instability imo.

[tyrlaan]

The community is so toxic and its hard to read any posts these days. The developers and owners of a piece of content change something (which is their main role) and people freak out like the world is ending. This is a fake graphical world that people start crying about. I like my streamers, but they cry too and its so annoying. If they were crying over a new law, something inhumane, or discriminatory then I would be behind it. However, this game has no actual bearing on real life, so they amount of crying is out of control.

They game isn't even out of beta and people go "they nerfed X ability by 1%, class is dead, don't play, and unsub this game now" and people spread this. Let the game come out, then we can rally as a community and get changes made. The people who complain are not even at the top 10% of players, so in theory, their class is highly playable and will "Out dps" or "out heal" the normal community of players if that individual is actually good. I have played numerous characters during expansions where it was deemed unplayable and did fine. Out of control and sad to continue reading these comments everywhere.

ALL OF THIS.

I barely come to MMO-C these days because of the overwhelming heaps of BS here. I just get my news from Wowhead and I'm good to go.

[Baneto]

If you disagree with someone its natural you see their opinion as "bashing, complaining" or even toxic.

This doesnt mean its bad feedback, just because you feel that way. There has to be room for negative feedback or there may not ever be any changes.

[Daedius]

I know if I get any response to this it will most likely be a lot of backfire because I am basically attacking a portion of the community, however this has starting to get very frustrating. I have been thinking a lot on this subject lately and I first thought it would come nothing good out of adressing it, but increasingly I feel the need to push back against this sillyness. I love this game so much and I would love to come on here to talk about awesome things, but I find myself very distracted by negativity which doesn't hold any water, most of the time.

So what am I really talking about? Well first of I need to mention that have high-functioning autism and that is somewhat relevant because I despise people as a collective (not in their individual components of course, I love spending time with certain people). Watching people from a distance behaving in groups is very interesting to me and something that always worries me. People have a tendency to rally behind negativity, not just in gaming but in general. Thats why we have riots and people march. Though some marches have good intentions and outcomes.

There is also this concept of content creators and the fact that negativity and controversy attract more attention. This feeds into this feedback loop which is very addicting to content creators. This is a huge factor of what is driving this negativity and the complaining and its speaks against its validity. Also, coming with negativity or critisism in general, not just regarding to World of Warcraft, have a tendency to make you appear as a more intelligent and sophisticated person. If you are complaining about something, you show that you have put effort into things, analyzed and made up your intelligent conclusion. Though this is hardly the case. On the other hand, if you are positive about something, you are just this somewhat ignorant gullable person who accepts anything at face value and probably is very forgiving and naive. I would say that is most often not the case at all.

So back to my autism thingy and how I don't like people in groups. When I see people even in a minority behave in a certain way I have a tendency to go the opposite direction and wonder why they are behaving in such a way. What is the reason behind it.

Evaluating the common complaints recently I find that 90% of the time they have no real proper reasoned arguments behind them and frankly if I might be so bold, say that they seem coming from posters that haven't made up their own arguments, but following a script. The sentences are formulated the same way and if there are more arguments behind it, it sounds equally the same. Now, that itself doesn't make an argument wrong. People could be posting from a script like mindless bots and come with accurate information. This just doesn't seem to be the case about issues related to recent issues people discuss.

Now, I know its provoking for me to reduce most opinions down to people just parroting others statements or like posting from a script, however that is how it appears to me and I am still open to a nuanced discussion around critisism from people who have put a lot of thought into their own arguments. However that is not what I see most of the time, though it happens from time to time.

Also I can watch a youtube or streamer with a lot of followers, and lo and behold, the next day I see people write exactly the same complaint, word for word in comment section on youtube and even here. I even saw many comments yesterday on Youtube to a specific video adressing class balance and people were writing "Oh I was so hyped for Shadowlands, but after watching this, I can't play this expansion after all" People will ACTUALLY accept a youtubers subjective opinion on something as gospel instead of trying the game for themselves.

I am going to adress the most recent complaint, but there are many of them like "BFA was garbage", "Covenants will fail". I would say both these statements are exaggurated and false. And the reality is far more nuanced. So I will only adress the most recent one for now.

The newest thing to complain about now is what has been refered to as "borrowed power". This has always existed, though at a lesser extent. We used to borrow legendaries and set bonuses from tier sets, leaving them behind as we went into new content. The argument is that Blizzard should stop making these systems and move them into talents and abilities and even spend more time working on balance.

These systems are a solution to a problem which was rightly complained about. Introducing new talents and abilities over several expansions gave us so many abilities that Blizzard decided to prune them. And we know how that was recieved. Making new abilities based on the theme of the expansion is a way to solve this issue. When it comes to balance then I think according to looking at warcraftlogs, the game has never been more balanced. But people are so obsessed with being optimal in every situation and never being at an disadvantage that even the 3% difference is unbearable to some people.

Another argument is that Blizzard should keep the systems going into new expansions. If that was a good idea then in Shadowlands we would spend 90% of our time in our garrisons, with legendary ring from MoP, having artifact weapons with 2000 Concordance of Legionfall, Azerite Armor with 6 rings, 20 legendary essences, 8 corruption effects, legendary cloak, covenant abilities, souldbinds, crafted legendaries having 90 different passive effects and procs going of all the time and you become this death machine with 140% haste all the time.

I am exaggurating a bit, but you have to see that this is not a good solution. Borrowed power is the best annoying solution compared to the alternatives.

Also I feel more and more sympathy for the developers of the game. They spend 10 hours a day or so, underpaid under bad conditions working on systems they now they must change in the future anyway because feedback from the usual suspects dictates so, just to come home and trying to connect with the community and they read posts that they should be fired and don't care about the game. It's a miracle we even have a game to log into at this point.

I will stop there for now and apologize this was a bit long. I have a lot more to say about this and since I have basically offended half of the people that post here, I guess I will have the opportunity to adress more issues if this is turning out something people are willing to discuss.

As paying customers people are entitled to make complaints and criticism of whatever they want. Whether Blizzard listens to them or not is at their own discretion.

[Niratias]

WoW is still fun, sure the developers and producers fuck up once in a while, but overall It's still going strong relatively speaking, and I hope it continues to do so.

[Magical Mudcrab]

I disagree with this post to be honest on the fact that Preach is objective. He sees the game on how it can fulfill his needs and what he wants from the game. And he doesn't ever admit to my knowledge that the playerbase play the game from other reasons that he does, or even I does.

It seems as though you've never even watched a video of Preach discussing Shadowlands, or at least have not watched them for long enough to realize that he frequently makes disclosures of when he believes the problems he's discussing will only affect high-end players, so it's very strange that you seem to be wanting to dismiss him by saying something untrue. He even goes into detail as to why he believes non-high-end players would be affected by a given change or system.

An example of this is when he discussed Covenant Swapping, and pointed out how this will affect hardcore and casual players differently, such as hardcore players needing to invest additional time in the case they need to have two characters of the same class with different covenants, whereas casual players will be primarily affected through being restricted choices in what they are able to play and it will disincentivize casual players from experimenting between covenants at later stages in the expansion due to time-gating; the former is a tangible problem which hardcore players will do what they need to in order to overcome it, whereas the latter is less tangible and will likely not affect a large number of even the casual community. That's just one hyper specific example from one of his covenants videos in which more than just swapping is discussed.

TL;DR: Anyone who has ever watched one of Preach's videos, regardless of whether they agree with them, would know that he typically gives disclosures and breaks down what he believes will only affect high-end players and issues which will affect more casual players.

I have played the game for 15 years and my theorycrafting skills are slightly above average and have looked at the covenants and the soulbinds and conduits. I dont see it as a mess at all.

It's good to know that you're theory crafting skills are unparalleled and exceed those of the members of the class discords, the various Mythic guilds, and the limited test data which we currently have access to. Your claim that there is no balancing mess - though it goes against what seems to be said in every technical discussion regarding covenant and soulbind performance/impact - really puts me at ease.

Do I see balance no? But that is not and should not be the goal either.

Now I'm not sure what to believe. You talk about theory crafting and say there is no mess - which could only mean you don't think there's a balancing mess - and then you follow that by saying you don't see balance. Which is it? Do you think Shadowlands looks balanced or unbalanced?

Additionally, why should some relative balance not be a goal? What we saw in raid testing throughout Beta was 40~% delta between various classes, and even within these classes there were massive differences between covenants. Obviously the intent from Blizzard is to try and provide some level of balance, and it seems to be something players are in overwhelming support of, so I'm a little unsure why you believe that balance should not be a goal. The only way performative metrics aren't going to be important to players is if addons which can track performance are wholly removed and if any system which requires high-level performance is nerfed to the ground to account for player inability to track personal - and group - performance. It would be unreasonable to not have some level of balance in output between classes and covenants.