This presentation didnt feel like "Winning players back" one

[Eurhetemec]

Because you seem to not understand just as much as Blizzard doesn't understand it. Borrowed Power is not the heart of the problem. Non-Evergreen features are. And Blizzard again, failed to hit that mark, just because they shifted player power away from expansion features, doesn't change the fact that the stuff they are doing here is the same as what ultimately landed them and caused this mess to begin with. At the end of the day, Dragonflight is just another Legion, BFA, and Shadowlands. More of the same, another self-contained expansion, but with a new coat of paint.

People want ever-green features, which isn't surprising that the most talked about and hyped points of this announcement are the revamped talent trees, revamped professions, and updated user interface.

While I can't speak for the player base as a whole, I can speak for myself, and I want something fresh, something ever-green. And what I saw here isn't enough.

I mean, you've completely and totally failed to explain what you want, and what the difference between this and something "evergreen" is. You give zero examples and just a lot of moaning and bold, so you should understand that not only are you unpersuasive, even if you were persuasive, you've got nothing to even persuade people to. It's like saying "Don't vote for X!" and we're like "So who should we vote for?" and you've got no answer. It see nothing that makes this "not evergreen" and, say, TBC/Wrath/Cata/MoP "evergreen".

It seems like making the game "evergreen" would more be about changing systems and how content works to a more FFXIV-like model than anything else.

Also "fresh and evergreen"? Sounds like all that will satisfy you is a pine tree mate.

[jallfo]

It's funny, I was watching the reveal, hearing them tick off the boxes for the whiners. He got:

New class and race
No "borrowed power"
Flying from the start of the expansion
Professions change
Expansion takes place on Azeroth

I smugly thought to myself "hah, there's no way those internet nerds will find something to complain about now! It'll take them months to come up with something to whine about!" I was sorely wrong, never underestimate the ability of the internet to bitch and moan.

The only real thing to complain about would be the terrible diversity-shoehorning" round table" and how awful that dragon race looks.

Hi there. Internet nerd here. I'm definitely not complaining because of everything you listed above but I am let's say.... "apprehensive" because I just don't know what content we'll be doing at end game. Sure we can assume a lot of things (WQ are coming back, there will be some cool new dungeons etc) but this is a prime example of "just show us".


Much like OP, I was hoping they would take a risk here. Do something very non-legacy blizzard like... and instead we got what is probably one of the safest / lowest risk expansion announcements ever.

[Runicblood]

Don't worry, some people have an actual taste, aren't sheeps for a rapist company, and expect something more than just a typical flying fantasy dragon and a talent tree revamp from the biggest MMO on the planet.

Glad to see tasteful people lurking forums of a tasteless game. Or is the game actually so full of flavor that you can't resist indirectly being part of its community?

[Diaphin]

Obviously many of people, like me, set themselves up for disappointment, but given the declining trend of last years, we could have honestly expect some extra efforts on Blizzard side when it comes to 10.0 expansion.

In the beginning of the presentation Ion said something about Blizzard listening to feedback and new focus on freedom of gameplay for the players, but NOTHING in the following presentation hinted at what exactly he ment (except for wider talent tree and profession contracts).

I expected to hear anything: player housing for those who mostly wants to build a home on the Azeroth? timewalking+? freedom of choosing the loot via PvE and PvP currency vendors? character cosmetics progression? Abilities to play with no restrictive systems?

None of that was mentioned, and we got nothing on will there be those systems or not, except for Ion's "of course there will be new systems", that got literally zero cover. This smells fishy as hell.

Also the whole reveal gave MASSIVE Shadowlands vibes.
Like, if to remove all the mess, the only hyping up things are Talent Revamp and Profession Revamp.

The rest (generic looking new zones, no glimpses of dungeons and raid, barely outlined story, race/class that looks meh, dragonriding that looks like purely show off feature) is a given thing.

I totally expected 10.0 to be Legion'ed, and instead was left with the bland and cheap taste of Shadowlands in the mouth.

Player Housing is a pretty fluff feature that most players probably would only rarely interact with while draining ressources that could be implemented better into gameplay related features. Timewalking+ isn't something substential feature that would warrant being part of an early expansion reveal, if it happens its more something for a X.X.5 patch to creat hype in the midst of an expansion, in an IGN interview Ion admitted that they are unsure on how they are handle loot in the future but that we will keep the great vault and character cosmetics aren't really an important game changing feature as well since we know at this point that its something Blizzard is doing in between and Ion stated that there would be no overarching borrowed power system this expansion.

Blizzard basically reacted to the core complaints from BFA and Shadowlands. No borrowed power, early flying which even gets expanded upon, a new class and a profession rewamp which was something people wanted to see for years now, as well as a return to Azeroth with a well-established expansion theme.

[Eurhetemec]

Much like OP, I was hoping they would take a risk here. Do something very non-legacy blizzard like... and instead we got what is probably one of the safest / lowest risk expansion announcements ever.

But why do you think they did that?

Is it because every time they take a risk everyone shits on it from a great height lol? I think that's got to be part of it!

Basically WoW is at a crossroads. It lost a lot of people to FFXIV (including me and most of the people I know who played WoW in the last five years) and just not playing. They could take a massive risk, not listen to players, and do something nuts, but I guess that they'd like to have jobs in a year or two, and if they do that, they might well end up without them. Instead, they've chosen, yes, an incredibly safe route - but you know what else was mega-safe? TBC and Wrath. In fact Wrath was the safest damn expansion WoW has ever done. It was also possibly the best. Legion was the safest expansion of the recent ones and... was it better than the rest? I'd say so. Shadowlands took risks and basically rode its horse off a cliff. That doesn't mean this will be good for sure, but it increases the odds, to my mind. It massively increases the odds of WoW still being here, still subscription, in two years from now.

Just seriously listening to players is bizarre - like I was saying, Blizzard have literally never done that before with an expansion, not in a serious and systematic way. Will it work out? I hope so. But we'll see.

[cocomen2]

New class looks so Divinity, so maybe its their try to make it more fantasy and appealing to lure in some generation Z players that prefer GW2 or FF14 style.

[Diaphin]

After watching the deep dive, yeah. Its an apology xpac. All that stuff you mentioned sounds great, but I stand by what I said about the class. It looks stupid, its a stupid concept and it looks like a fashion show twink went sharkweek on a water balloon filled with grease, glitter, and neon food coloring.
Why the hell did it have to be ANOTHER elf model.
I know I could just not play it, but a decent class idea died for us to get that pile of glam rock garbage.

I think thats a good thing, as it gets all the guys who helped Blizz get away with their rape culture for years and enforce this kind of misogynist gamergate culture in the hobby triggered. I think Blizzard needs to build on this, for example enforcing a gay romance on the player character which is not optional, your character just being canonically established to be gay.

[Sugani]

I mean, you've completely and totally failed to explain what you want, and what the difference between this and something "evergreen" is. You give zero examples and just a lot of moaning and bold, so you should understand that not only are you unpersuasive, even if you were persuasive, you've got nothing to even persuade people to. It's like saying "Don't vote for X!" and we're like "So who should we vote for?" and you've got no answer. It see nothing that makes this "not evergreen" and, say, TBC/Wrath/Cata/MoP "evergreen".

It seems like making the game "evergreen" would more be about changing systems and how content works to a more FFXIV-like model than anything else.

Also "fresh and evergreen"? Sounds like all that will satisfy you is a pine tree mate.

My post was under the assumption that the term 'ever-green' was understood. It's a pretty common term, in short; "Evergreen content is content that persists over time, that is, it doesn't have an expiration date and can't become obsolete."

Expansion features that are locked to specific expansions are not evergreen. Artifact Weapons, Class Halls, Azerite Gear, Heart of Azerite, Covenants, Garrisons. Content that becomes obsolete once the expansion runs its course.

But yea, go ahead, keep acting like a moron. What the fuck kind of reply is this. Christ.

[pahbi]

The presentation felt like a late night infomercial.

[infinitemeridian]

The problem is this:

1) UI Updates as a major headlining feature...why? Just why? They aren't even that different from what we currently have, arguably worse (The new health bars look awful). In a game where everyone's UI is so heavily modded, I find it hard to care.

2) Dragon race / class is kind of underwhelming. It feels too "disney". The dragon forms look hilariously bad, the limited selection of races / classes is eh, and the specs themselves didn't really seem to have the same wow-factor that demon hunters had.

3) Profession updates - hard to get excited about these. Nothing they showed seems like that big of a change to how they work. The work orders is a nice idea, but professions still work the same apart from the new quality aspect. Nobody really plays the game for professions though, they're just there to make gold and that doesn't look to be changing.

4) New zones seem really familiar to older ones. They look...fine? Passable? Nothing about them screams awesome new and unique zone, or even something dragon-related.

5) The dragon riding might be cool, but right now it seems like a gimmick tied to the expansion and not something that would be expanded across them as a new "pillar" of content. I kind of doubt this will get anything interesting to do with it until the last patch.

At the end of the day, it seems like more of the same. There's no real change in philosophy - the game is still an endless loot treadmill with zero player creativity or interesting non-combat content. No player / guild housing, no class skins, no updates to timewalking / old content, no world revamp. The only cool thing so far is the talent updates, but hard to gauge how interesting these will be right now. The devil is in the details and the alpha / beta will give us a better idea of course, but Legion really felt like the last time they had an original idea.

[Diaphin]

At the end of the day, it seems like more of the same. There's no real change in philosophy - the game is still an endless loot treadmill with zero player creativity or interesting non-combat content. No player / guild housing, no class skins, no updates to timewalking / old content, no world revamp. The only cool thing so far is the talent updates, but hard to gauge how interesting these will be right now. The devil is in the details and the alpha / beta will give us a better idea of course, but Legion really felt like the last time they had an original idea.

All of these features you name sound like something that would be the death of WoW if they would be the focus of an expansion, as they seem to cater solely towards roleplayers and people who spend their time leveling alts all the time. Especially with the chromie-time feature, world revamps are just not necessary and would be nothing but wasted time, because we already have a system in place to keep up leveling alts and new characters with current questing standarts.

[Eurhetemec]

My post was under the assumption that the term 'ever-green' was understood. It's a pretty common term, in short; "Evergreen content is content that persists over time, that is, it doesn't have an expiration date and can't become obsolete."

Expansion features that are locked to specific expansions are not evergreen. Artifact Weapons, Class Halls, Azerite Gear, Heart of Azerite, Covenants, Garrisons. Content that becomes obsolete once the expansion runs its course.

But yea, go ahead, keep acting like a moron. What the fuck kind of reply is this. Christ.

I know what evergreen means, and being shitty with me and trying to get yourself reported isn't helping your case.

You still haven't listed a single example of "evergreen content" in WoW expansions. You listed yet more examples of non-evergreen content (thanks, that was obvious), but none of evergreen content.

I'm asking you to list examples of evergreen content in WoW expansions, not "not evergreen". Come on.

[Cuppy]

so this time around what we're doing is pouring all our energy into permanent revamps overhauls and improvements into wow's core systems... We want to take a look at our talent systems, our UI and our professions.

What basically means that there will be even more token emphasis on everything. Finally a game that requires a subscription AND I get to spend even more money on systems(or you know, farm daily quests for a month) Can’t wait!

[Sugani]

I know what evergreen means, and being shitty with me and trying to get yourself reported isn't helping your case.

You still haven't listed a single example of "evergreen content" in WoW expansions. You listed yet more examples of non-evergreen content (thanks, that was obvious), but none of evergreen content.

I'm asking you to list examples of evergreen content in WoW expansions, not "not evergreen". Come on.

Nah, you can piss off with this shitty attitude.

[Huehuecoyotl]

Is "we're going to try to fix some of the things people have been telling us have been broken for at least the last 4 years, honest guys" really enough to bring people back? At this point, with their recent track record in what they believe is acceptable game design, who thinks they're even capable to doing this properly?

Nothing about Shadowlands suggests to me that they have people in charge that understand what makes games fun to play. Unless the shameless bean counters have had their grubby paws ripped entirely off this IP, I can't imagine they're going to be allowed to change enough, far enough, to make a proper difference. If I do come back again, it won't be for launch. At the earliest it will be a couple of months later, once the dust has settled and proper reviews are made.

[Eurhetemec]

Nah, you can piss off with this shitty attitude.

So let's get this straight, you:

A) Make a complaint post but give zero examples of what you want.

B) I ask for examples.

C) You call me a moron and still give zero examples.

D) I ask for examples.

E) You call me "shitty" for asking for examples.

Yeah I'm beginning to think maybe you just don't even know what you want, let alone have any examples of it lol.

[LordVargK]

You definitely did not understand what you responded to

What should the poster understand? There is one overarching system, that was a success. Mythic plus dungeons. Island expeditions, Torghast and Warfronts had the potential to be such a system but were fundamentally flawed and not fun to use. So it's not like Blizzard did not try new systems, but ultimately only one was a success.

[Caprias]

Their budget got cut, they can't bring more than this probably.

[Gamingsince1981]

Lmao look at the people going "flight from the start stop complaining" the flight needs to be levelled up to actually function , it will be limited to how long you can fly how high you can fly and how fast you can fly, I can bet you it will take longer to get the flying levelled up that it does to even get pathfinder done, its just anew way to stop you just flying once again.

[Rozz]

Part of me wonders if they gave up because they know wowhead will do the advertising for them.

I always wanted a dragon race, but it feels hard to care when they showed us the same clips and not much of the customization. For instance, the faces look really awkward. Manic pixie awkward.

It's giving Ardenweald vibes, where many models have uncanny faces to me.