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Qhue

Qhue

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Let's assume that the next expansion was going to be a "Back to Azeroth" where we made a significant time jump and hence Cata-like reboot of the main zones. Such an undertaking would require substantial effort on the part of both the narrative and art teams as well as the various people who work on quests etc. It would likely need to be far more extensive than even the Cata era reworking and yet they are now facing not only a huge talent drain due to many different factors but also a huge decrease in overall expected revenue.

It would then be logical to assume that such a big undertaking was untenable and thus required a complete rescoping of the project and subsequent year+ delay... which will only further erode the playerbase and presumptive need for something BIG to bring people back.
 
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Big Phoenix

Big Phoenix

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Kuro

Kuro

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Inb4 she left because Ybarra gave her an open palmed slap on the ass
 
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jayrebb

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Qhue said:
Those are wishy washy words that are not generally accepted terms. It could be as simple as 'the people we still have play a lot and throw us lots of coin for mounts and long-term-subscription deals'.

It's likely similar to the 'per person' metric whereby you call it a success if you manage to sell lots of stuff to each customer even if this means you actually have very few customers and thus low total revenue.
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AFAIK "Monthly Active Users" is bloated somehow as well. I forget the criteria exactly but I remember it being very forgiving in terms of what an "active" user means.

It certainly includes people who sub and don't play if I recall correctly?
 
Chris

Chris

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jayrebb said:
AFAIK "Monthly Active Users" is bloated somehow as well. I forget the criteria exactly but I remember it being very forgiving in terms of what an "active" user means.

It certainly includes people who sub and don't play if I recall correctly?
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MAU is logging into one game during the month.

If you logged into WoW, WoW Classic, D2 and Heathstone then you are 4 MAUs.
 
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TheAylix

TheAylix

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Chris said:
MAU is logging into one game during the month.

If you logged into WoW, WoW Classic, D2 and Heathstone then you are 4 MAUs.
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Exactly. They obliquely refer to that in one of the slides:


See the bit about how "World of Warcraft reach and engagement continues to benefit from the combination of the Modern game and Classic under a single subscription." That allows Blizzard to declare that someone who mostly plays TBC Classic, but logged in to Modern WoW and Classic Wow even once during the last month, as 3 MAUs.

Buying any sort of Blizzard shop service, mount, leveling, and especially WoW tokens all count towards the "net bookings" metric. As all of these paid services continue to expand and now encompass multiple WoW games simultaneously, they can generate more revenue even as the playbase shrinks overall.
 
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Kuro

Kuro

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They need to lie about player numbers the honest way, by encouraging mass multiboxing and then counting all the boxed enchanters and shamans.
 
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Ukerric

Ukerric

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More on the WoW design, and the time-walking design ("you have only two weeks to experience old content, then it's gone for the next four months! Forget about FF14 raids, or you miss this opportunity!"):

journals.plos.org

A threat to loyalty: Fear of missing out (FOMO) leads to reluctance to repeat current experiences

We investigate a popular but underresearched concept, the fear of missing out (FOMO), on desirable experiences of which an individual is aware, but in which they do not partake. Through laboratory and field studies, we establish FOMO’s pervasiveness as a psychological phenomenon, present...
journals.plos.org journals.plos.org

FOMO is associated with increased negative mood, lower life satisfaction, and unmet psychological needs...
Click to expand...
 
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Chris

Chris

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Ukerric said:
More on the WoW design, and the time-walking design ("you have only two weeks to experience old content, then it's gone for the next four months! Forget about FF14 raids, or you miss this opportunity!"):

journals.plos.org

A threat to loyalty: Fear of missing out (FOMO) leads to reluctance to repeat current experiences

We investigate a popular but underresearched concept, the fear of missing out (FOMO), on desirable experiences of which an individual is aware, but in which they do not partake. Through laboratory and field studies, we establish FOMO’s pervasiveness as a psychological phenomenon, present...
journals.plos.org journals.plos.org
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There's a whole bunch of games which use FOMO which I will never play again because I missed too many weekly events and feel like I'll be gimped coming back.

Genshin Impact for example. I've missed too many events and rewards, though the new zone may tempt me back eventually.

I didn't really like FF14 having seasonal events I could miss, but they were all cosmetic stuff only so whatever.

I also didn't like the FF14 roulette bonus being once a day, I took a break once I had to rely on that for alt levelling. Again a relativly minor FOMO compared to WoW systems.
 
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Janx

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Qhue said:
Let's assume that the next expansion was going to be a "Back to Azeroth" where we made a significant time jump and hence Cata-like reboot of the main zones. Such an undertaking would require substantial effort on the part of both the narrative and art teams as well as the various people who work on quests etc. It would likely need to be far more extensive than even the Cata era reworking and yet they are now facing not only a huge talent drain due to many different factors but also a huge decrease in overall expected revenue.

It would then be logical to assume that such a big undertaking was untenable and thus required a complete rescoping of the project and subsequent year+ delay... which will only further erode the playerbase and presumptive need for something BIG to bring people back.
Click to expand...
Seems like they've been making progress on the new char models

1636019304264.png
 
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Neranja

Neranja

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Qhue said:
Let's assume that the next expansion was going to be a "Back to Azeroth" where we made a significant time jump and hence Cata-like reboot of the main zones. Such an undertaking would require substantial effort on the part of both the narrative and art teams as well as the various people who work on quests etc.
Click to expand...
If they do that they'll probably go heavy Caverns of Time, and do only select zones where you can switch back and forth between timelines by talking to Zidormi, like in Darkshore. And that will be the final "they are only phoning it home" moment for the player base.

And the people stuck in the maze will still defend it:

1636031098388.jpeg
 
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Neranja

Neranja

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Oh god, "special instructions and templates on how to phrase our feedback so as not to annoy or hurt the devs feelings". The whole dev team is a safe space. This explains so much, yet raises so many new questions:



EDIT: Oh, and here's the real reason they are doing this:
 
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Mist

Mist

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Neranja said:
Oh god, "special instructions and templates on how to phrase our feedback so as not to annoy or hurt the devs feelings". The whole dev team is a safe space. This explains so much, yet raises so many new questions:



EDIT: Oh, and here's the real reason they are doing this:
Click to expand...

Actually this is totally normal for insider feedback forums and has been for 20 years if you've ever been involved in one for an MMO before.

They want to break you out of the mold of phrasing your posts like you're posting on the public forums, where people will just use the same viral language, and actually think about your feedback by using your own words.

Instead of just saying "this is overpowered" they want you to have to say "this does 200000+ damage in 3 seconds, in a 5+ target AOE situation, where other classes do not have access to similar abilities that do comparable damage in similar situations."
 
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Chris

Chris

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Neranja said:
Oh, and here's the real reason they are doing this:
Click to expand...

Yeah this makes sense. Bellular was VERY positive about the Community Council when everyone else was telling them to fuck off because they used to have this and ignored it. Bellular also applied to join it, so it totally flipped his perspective because he thought he could have a say in development (he won't).

So they just want some leverage to get control of the narrative from influencers... except we didn't quit because of the influencers telling us the game was bad... we quit because the game was bad and the influencers agreed with us.

I actually never watched a single WoW influencer when I played because I knew the game inside out and just read up on stuff on WoWhead. I do watch them now though, shitting on WoW and crying over FF14 waifu and husbando deaths.
 
Neranja

Neranja

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Mist said:
They want to break you out of the mold of phrasing your posts like you're posting on the public forums, where people will just use the same viral language, and actually think about your feedback by using your own words.
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No, you're wrong. First, we are talking here about professionals on both sides, as in: both sides get paid.

Then, even if feedback consists of standard phrases, the developers should filter that language out and correlate that there might be a problem that warrants further investigation. Sometimes feedback consists of players feeling something is off, or not as rewarding, but they can't put their finger on it. This is also a very valuable feedback. Hire some community managers, let them filter it and present it to you in a concise manner, so you don't waste developer time for this.

Also, the human brain literally works the other way around: you make a decision and rationalise it afterwards with arguments. Look the research up, it's very interesting to see the brain activity scans. This is also the reason why gaming companies invest a lot of money into player retention analysis, with complete graphs were player drop-offs occur.

Remember when feedback for the Legion Shadowpriest was that it could funnel enough insanity to keep voidform going perpetually? The developer argued back that the math was wrong. So even with this precise feedback nothing happened until it was too late.

Also, a point I don't need to make myself:


The punch line here is: "All in all, whilst players abided to that ruleset, the carefully written feedback was fully ignored and never saw any actual change in the game." And this is why most players feel the whole community council thing is a farce. It may work in other MMO games, but Blizzard ignored any and all avenues of feedbacks for years.

And we can all pinpoint the moment it all started to go downhill to the exact moment Ghostcrawler left the building.
 
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Mist

Mist

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Thanks for highlighting a post that explains exactly what I was talking about.

Neranja said:
Sometimes feedback consists of players feeling something is off, or not as rewarding, but they can't put their finger on it. This is also a very valuable feedback. Hire some community managers, let them filter it and present it to you in a concise manner, so you don't waste developer time for this.
Click to expand...
Right, this is what the general public forums are for.

Private feedback forums are meant to have an entirely different style of feedback, which is why they force you to break out of the mold of parroting the typical public forum language, like I said.
 
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