World of Warcraft: Current Year

Chris · Jul 2, 2021

I don't think group finder for dungeons is a problem, I didn't learn who anyone was back in vanilla. It was just "LF1M Tank" over and over again.

Guilds for raids is another matter, you did learn those people. LFR definitely hurt guilds.

They never iterated on guilds though, it's unchanged since vanilla, there's no incentive to join since they removed guild perks.

It's the same story for everything. System has small flaws which become more prominent as time goes on because no effort it put into fixing the flaws and incompetence iterates the system to be worse.

Neranja · Jul 2, 2021

Chris said:
there's no incentive to join since they removed guild perks.

Aren't there faster hearthstone, guild banking and faster mounts still current guild perks? You just can't level a guild anymore.

Blizzard removed the "gold" farming perk for guilds after it led to people creating big "cesspool guilds" with all the casuals, who let those casuals farm gold for them. And the casuals loved it, because they didn't have to apply for such a guild. I was in one with my banking alt, because being in a guild stopped the guild invite spam. Guess what: "this is the best guild evar!" scrolled by in guild chat. I also knew the guy who ran it, he was later banned for botting in battlegrounds.

Chris said:
no effort it put into fixing the flaws and incompetence iterates the system to be worse.

I think its part incompetence, and part cargo cult: There is no one left who understands the underlying design principles behind WoW and MMORPG games in general, as the design wasn't documented internally. Probably because everyone was busy and it was obvious to them, so why write it down? Right now everyone is afraid to do something wrong and piss off the players even more. At the same time they are too arrogant to listen to ideas and feedback from the players, because they didn't come up with them.

It boils down to Blizzard being too afraid to try new things, because they fear players could play their game wrong. So everything is on rails as much as possible with the illusion of "meaningful choice".

BoozeCube · Jul 4, 2021

Well in typical Blizzard dumb fuck fashion they show once again why they are bleeding subs. I guess Asmongold streamed FF14 today getting 200k+ viewers for checking out the game.

At the same time one of the WoW Developers on their business account decides to call him an asshole, gets immediate backlash and now a bunch of devs business accounts have been made private with deleted messages. Meanwhile Sqare/Enix decides to use their official account to follow the dude hop in his stream and give out a bunch of free subs. (I mean it's just basic PR things, but holy shit is Blizzard full of autistic retards.)

Neranja · Jul 4, 2021

BoozeCube said:
Meanwhile Sqare/Enix decides to use their official account to follow the dude hop in his stream and give out a bunch of free subs.

It's far worse than that: SE is running a Twitch promo right now where you can get a mount if you gift 4 subs to a participating streamer. For basically $20 you can get the fat black chocobo mount.

SE is far better at engaging both with their playerbase and their streamers. Which is amazing, because Blizzard is doing this longer, and is bigger. Of course people were starting to grasp at straws why SE did a bad thing:

"Not enough BiPoC content creators were chosen by SE for this." At the same time SE is smart to not just allow the whole category on Twitch, so greedy streamers don't suddenly find their love for FFXIV, and I guess some big PoC streamer go skipped because all they do is fishing and complaining about politics, which would be a sad look for the game.
"The black chocobo mount in question is running after a watermelon, which is a racial insult!" It does not, it's a type of cabbage called Gysahl green.

AnnieFuchisa was in the last AllCast, where she told the story that Blizzard at most promoted some EU streamers in their launcher. But this is basically canceled now because ... they laid of the EU community staff that worked with them.

Another example: The developers at SE not only know about player memes, they actively engage with them. Blizzard is far too afraid to engage with its playerbase in any capacity. I think they do not realize how toxic and resentful their playerbase has become, but call Asmongold's streamer persona an asshole.

At this point in time it does not matter if you have the better game, when in an MMO setting enjoyment comes from playing with other human beings. When the only human beings left to play with are mostly assholes, then you will lose subs.

Dalien · Jul 4, 2021

Neranja said:
Another example: The developers at SE not only know about player memes, they actively engage with them. Blizzard is far too afraid to engage with its playerbase in any capacity. I think they do not realize how toxic and resentful their playerbase has become, but call Asmongold's streamer persona an asshole.

It looks like the FF14 guys are having so much fun. Reminds me of the old Blizzcons when they were passionate about the game. Imagine Ion, Lore and J. Allen Brack up on stage trying to dance like that lol.

I unsubbed 3-4 months ago and if I come back at all for 9.1 it will be in November when all their shit timegated systems are fully unlocked. Probably won't, will wait to see if they knock 9.2 out of the fucking park.

They just can't help themselves.

Morrow · Jul 4, 2021

Chris said:
I don't think group finder for dungeons is a problem, I didn't learn who anyone was back in vanilla. It was just "LF1M Tank" over and over again.

Guilds for raids is another matter, you did learn those people. LFR definitely hurt guilds.

They never iterated on guilds though, it's unchanged since vanilla, there's no incentive to join since they removed guild perks.

It's the same story for everything. System has small flaws which become more prominent as time goes on because no effort it put into fixing the flaws and incompetence iterates the system to be worse.

Either you're misremembering your classic experience or you only did like 2 low level dungeons?

It was impossible not to make friends and make long term connections in true vanilla dungeons. It took a while to get a group together, it took a while to get to the dungeon, and they were crawls. You had to communicate and work together, particularly in the 40+, especially 50+ dungeons, but really all of them. You made friends with the good/fun players because it was exceptionally fun to group with them.

You'd have to be 100% autistic to have played through original WoW Classic and not made any friends/connections/gotten to know anyone in your dungeons... When you ran Scholo and had a great team of people CCing like smooth butter and rolling through the dungeon, having a blast, you made friends, because you wanted to repeat the experience.

Dalien · Jul 4, 2021

Neranja said:
It boils down to Blizzard being too afraid to try new things, because they fear players could play their game wrong.

Honestly this is the root of their design problems. They view anything outside of their intended design philosophy as "degenerative gameplay" and are control freaks about it.

Exhibit A: this was stealth nerfed in 9.1 after like a decade of it being the same, probably because it probably gives some slight advantage in the new Mythic raid or M+

Used to be 10% speed, now it's like 1% speed.

Morrow · Jul 4, 2021

Dalien said:
Honestly this is the root of their design problems. They view anything outside of their intended design philosophy as "degenerative gameplay" and are control freaks about it.

Exhibit A: this was stealth nerfed in 9.1 after like a decade of it being the same, probably because it probably gives some slight advantage in the new Mythic raid or M+

Used to be 10% speed, now it's like 1% speed.

Fun detected. I read this article recently from the 90's about MUDs and how there is this cycle where the developers eventually turn antagonistic toward the players and will nerf everything into the ground and force everyone to play the game exactly the way they envisioned it. It was super interesting because it is literally exactly what has happened to WoW and has happened to many other MMOs. I wish I could remember it/find it. Maybe it was linked here and that's where I read it tho lol.

You can literally sum up everything wrong with modern WoW development with a screenshot of an item that was suddenly nerfed after 10 years.

Dalien · Jul 4, 2021

Morrow said:
Fun detected. I read this article recently from the 90's about MUDs and how there is this cycle where the developers eventually turn antagonistic toward the players and will nerf everything into the ground and force everyone to play the game exactly the way they envisioned it. It was super interesting because it is literally exactly what has happened to WoW and has happened to many other MMOs. I wish I could remember it/find it. Maybe it was linked here and that's where I read it tho lol.

You can literally sum up everything wrong with modern WoW development with a screenshot of an item that was suddenly nerfed after 10 years.

This is probably the article you read: The Mud Whimping Guidebook Page -Ruin your game by nerfing or wimping players

and yeah, it's very relevant to the current WoW dev team.

Morrow · Jul 4, 2021

Dalien said:
This is probably the article you read: The Mud Whimping Guidebook Page -Ruin your game by nerfing or wimping players

and yeah, it's very relevant to the current WoW dev team.

That's it! Reading that was crazy, because it's exactly how I've envisioned Blizzard for the last however many years. It's seriously bizarre psychology at play.

Neranja · Jul 4, 2021

Dalien said:
They view anything outside of their intended design philosophy as "degenerative gameplay" and are control freaks about it.

At the same time they have a massive boosting for gold/cash problem because of that, that is also turning their players resentful. Because they are not doing anything about it.

Bellular called it "the death throes of a dying Korean MMO."

Chris · Jul 4, 2021

Morrow said:
Either you're misremembering your classic experience or you only did like 2 low level dungeons?

It was impossible not to make friends and make long term connections in true vanilla dungeons. It took a while to get a group together, it took a while to get to the dungeon, and they were crawls. You had to communicate and work together, particularly in the 40+, especially 50+ dungeons, but really all of them. You made friends with the good/fun players because it was exceptionally fun to group with them.

You'd have to be 100% autistic to have played through original WoW Classic and not made any friends/connections/gotten to know anyone in your dungeons... When you ran Scholo and had a great team of people CCing like smooth butter and rolling through the dungeon, having a blast, you made friends, because you wanted to repeat the experience.

I did MC on three characters, BWL and half of AQ40 on one.

I made connections in my guilds, randoms not really, too unreliable.

Morrow · Jul 4, 2021

Chris said:
I did MC on three characters, BWL and half of AQ40 on one.

I made connections in my guilds, randoms not really, too unreliable.

MC/BWL/AQ40 are raids. I was responding to you saying group finder for dungeons isn't a problem. I wasn't referring to raids. I don't know how anybody played classic WoW at launch and level'd to 60 and did dungeons and didn't make great connections/friends. You'd have to literally avoid it or be super antisocial, or already have a pre established clique that you did everything with.

Araxen · Jul 4, 2021

Dalien said:
This is probably the article you read: The Mud Whimping Guidebook Page -Ruin your game by nerfing or wimping players

and yeah, it's very relevant to the current WoW dev team.

Dang it's so spot on. It's incredible.

To punish the average player for the success of your top ten percent players is ridiculous.

Morrow · Jul 4, 2021

Araxen said:
Dang it's so spot on. It's incredible.

I know right? It must be something deep in human psychology for it to happen to every game after a long enough time. It's a shame there doesn't seem to be people in charge of an MMORPG who instead learned from it and overcame it.

Mist · Jul 4, 2021

I don't see how you sustain a game with millions of players engaging in anything resembling vaguely competitive content without removing unintended exploits. This isn't something that happened recently, it's been happening the entire length of the game.

This goes all the way back to The Judge's Gavel which would, in vanilla, banish players, causing them to drop flags in WSG.

Cybsled · Jul 4, 2021

That mud article is good, but the author pushing hard for "wimping" over "nerfing" was annoying lol

Chris · Jul 4, 2021

Mist said:
I don't see how you sustain a game with millions of players engaging in anything resembling vaguely competitive content without removing unintended exploits. This isn't something that happened recently, it's been happening the entire length of the game.

This goes all the way back to The Judge's Gavel which would, in vanilla, banish players, causing them to drop flags in WSG.

You recognise that players are having fun using it and then balance the tool.

Perhaps PvP weapons all have a proc with a beneficial effect for each Battleground. One could be stunning hammers, but have some compelling other choices. Incentivises people to not just use the highest ilevel PvE weapon.

Then perhaps PvP trinkets have a 30s stun immunity option, popping it at the right time would make flag carrying more interactive.

Just a quick example, a design team should be able to take a bit of unintended gameplay and make it into a balanced feature far better than me.

jayrebb · Jul 4, 2021

Dalien said:
It looks like the FF14 guys are having so much fun. Reminds me of the old Blizzcons when they were passionate about the game. Imagine Ion, Lore and J. Allen Brack up on stage trying to dance like that lol.

I unsubbed 3-4 months ago and if I come back at all for 9.1 it will be in November when all their shit timegated systems are fully unlocked. Probably won't, will wait to see if they knock 9.2 out of the fucking park.

They just can't help themselves.

What's funny is I would have continued playing 9.0 probably for another month or two.

9.1 going live edges it to quit material. I can't imagine what the heroic raid week fallout will look like, as most players feel the same way.

Releasing 9.1 is actually a plague on the game. Domination sockets suck and their idea of set bonuses is a massive disappointment. This is not the set bonuses we wanted. Set bonuses aren't supposed to be a system.

Penance · Jul 4, 2021

I really hate to be the guy that posts Asmon videos but this might have been funniest shit I've ever seen all week.

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World of Warcraft: Current Year

Chris

Potato del Grande

Neranja

BoozeCube

The Wokest

Neranja

Dalien

Registered Hodor

Morrow

Trakanon Raider

Dalien

Registered Hodor

Morrow

Trakanon Raider

Dalien

Registered Hodor

Morrow

Trakanon Raider

Neranja

Chris

Potato del Grande

Morrow

Trakanon Raider

Araxen

Golden Baronet of the Realm

Morrow

Trakanon Raider

Mist

REEEEeyore

Cybsled

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider

Chris

Potato del Grande

jayrebb

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider

Penance

Silver Baronet of the Realm