Current Events > Do large game developers...actually play their games

(+) Yeah! (+)

Look I'm a filthy casual gamer, the two games I play the most are FIFA 18 and World of Warcraft.

FIFA 18 has been panned by the community, everyone hates the gameplay as they've slowed it down and passing feels RNG. The gameplay video of FIFA 19 looks even slower. The first few weeks of FIFA 18, we were all saying that this feels like the best gameplay in a few years, since FIFA 15, and then they completely changed it and slowed it down over a few months. Despite ALL the feedback being that it was getting worse and worse. WHY??

Blizzard recently had a poll where they asked what Legion add-on we'd most like to see in BFA. The second most popular option was World Quest Group Finder. Blizzard just announced they're literally breaking that add-on and making it harder to find groups for World Quests in Battle for Azeroth? This directly contradicts what the community have just told them.

WHY? Why do developers act in this way? I understand it's all about making $$$... but directly contradicting your community would be the worst way to increase revenue?
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If the video of the capcom developer playing the RE2 Remake is any indication than no they do not.
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I google FIFA 18 without giving a shit about fifa and see it has reviews about the same as every other FIFA.

I google the WoW World Quest Group finder and I see people demanding it get taken away because apparently it takes what was meant to be a socializing feature that will bring people that share a server together and form a connection and turns it into yet another mindless grind fest.

In regards to FIFA: You are an overly judgmental. "FIFA 17 got an 85 on gamerankings, FIFA 18 got an 84. Worst game ever." Could you seem like a bigger douche to the outside observer?

In regards to WoW.... I stopped playing WoW a long time ago but the whole point is that its an MMO. It became a lot better for solo players with auto group finding back in the day (back when I played this was still new) but what was lost was the manual group finding within servers that brought guilds into existence and some sense of community. There has to be some kind of balance between the benefits of being social and the benefits of a mindless grind in an MMO.

Your complaint about this mod seems to be you basically saying that you reject any attempt by blizzard to try and get players to be more social and less anti-social.

You literally don't play either game or are involved in either community and yet you base your opinion higher than mine after 5 minutes of googling.
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DavidWong posted...

You literally don't play either game or are involved in either community and yet you base your opinion higher than mine after 5 minutes of googling.

I played WoW for five years, which I've acknowledged is a small portion of its lifetime but back when I stepped away it seemed like a vast fucking span of years to be playing a single game and I feel like I understand what you are talking about.

Basically the thing you are griping about sounds like a cheese to me. Vast amounts of content exist for groups and you are taking one of the few things they took efforts to try and balance around solo or tiny groups that know eachother and adding a group finder to it. Why run the content balanced for people using a group finder when you could run content balanced for solo players and run a cheat group finder add on.

Right? Am I missing anything here? If you actually stepped away from WoW for a few years you would look at this kind of crap as it is. You are practically drooling with rage at the idea that they in any way are encouraging people fucking talking to eachother or trying to form any sort of lasting relationship beyond drooling and hitting the auto-group button in their ui and then forgetting about the people they grouped with 30 minutes later.

WoW was designed to group up. For quests, too.

You can still group for quests, this just makes it more difficult. It's an inconvenience.

If they're going to do this, then just come out and make it so you can only quest with people on your server, like Mythic Raiding. Don't just make it slightly more annoying for people.
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They do. But game development is complex with hundreds of different people with different opinions and they're answering to a bunch of business men overlords who are interested in deadlines and profits and are overall detached to the games development.

The community person (the one who actually interacts with the community) also doesn't usually develop anything for the game. They just forward relevant feedback when given the chance or opportunity.
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DavidWong posted...

WoW was designed to group up. For quests, too.

You can still group for quests, this just makes it more difficult. It's an inconvenience.

If they're going to do this, then just come out and make it so you can only quest with people on your server, like Mythic Raiding. Don't just make it slightly more annoying for people.

Please don't give them any fucking ideas
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Genocet_10-325 posted...

DavidWong posted...

WoW was designed to group up. For quests, too.

You can still group for quests, this just makes it more difficult. It's an inconvenience.

If they're going to do this, then just come out and make it so you can only quest with people on your server, like Mythic Raiding. Don't just make it slightly more annoying for people.

Please don't give them any fucking ideas

Coming to Battle For Azeroth: Mythic Questing!
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DavidWong posted...

WoW was designed to group up. For quests, too.

You can still group for quests, this just makes it more difficult. It's an inconvenience.

If they're going to do this, then just come out and make it so you can only quest with people on your server, like Mythic Raiding. Don't just make it slightly more annoying for people.

God forbid there is a single form of questing in the game where you have to speak to another human being to form a group right?

Am I reading this situation wrong? Literally all you would have to do to form a group is say "please form a group with me to do X" and someone else would invite you. If people in MMOs had any social sense or literacy or any ability to actually engage with another human being or weren't actually bots that obviously wouldn't have these skills.

I'm speaking a bit from anger here but I've tried MMOs in the recent past and the lasting impression I've had is that people have basically stopped acting like people in most of them if they ever did. When I played WoW at launch people spoke to one another. They formed parties in the general chat. They talked, guilds formed, people moved forward together and it was MULTIPLAYER. When I've played them more recently? Good luck getting another human being to say a single fucking word to you in the open world. Good luck getting your group mates in a group of 4 to even speak.

Are here is you, blizzard doing their best to invite you out of your shell and invite you to actually talk to another person in an MMO and here is you raging about it. How dare they offer any incentive for acting like anything other than anti-social in 2018. Why are you even playing an MMO? Why do you need EVERYTHING in it to be formed around solo play? You rant and rave and say "game ruined" because they did anything to encourage human beings speaking to eachother over mindless grind.

You're talking about EA and Activision/Blizzard...easily the worst devs/producers in the industry...the fuck do you expect?
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blizzard had their own system for grouping up for group quests. As soon as your near one you can hit a button to instantly find a group.

While it's true that solo quests could be grouped up using the addon most of them are so easy that its a waste of time. If you complain about this your either bad or shouldn't be playing wow
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Atralis posted...

God forbid there is a single form of questing in the game where you have to speak to another human being to form a group right?

Seriously? It'd be much faster to just solo the damn things than to manually find groups for each World Quest up at the same time, which is, what, 30-40 of them? You make yourself seem incredibly stupid when you argue about things you know nothing about.
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Azardea posted...

Atralis posted...

God forbid there is a single form of questing in the game where you have to speak to another human being to form a group right?

Seriously? It'd be much faster to just solo the damn things than to manually find groups for each World Quest up at the same time, which is, what, 30-40 of them? You make yourself seem incredibly stupid when you argue about things you know nothing about.

If it actually is easier to solo the damn things then why do you need a group? You pop into a zone , the mod auto groups you, the quest is done 3 minutes later with you killing NOTHING? Is that not a cheat?

Why is this type of autogroup necessary? If I played WoW to this day instead of quitting almost 10 years ago I would realize how important it is in the current progression system to have something where people with the mod can warp into a zone, auto group with a mix of players and bots, drool and watching their favorite netflix show, and warp out two minutes later instead of 25 minutes later with all the same rewards. Because that kind of mindless anti social bullshit cheating is the true essence of WoW these days.

Atralis posted...

If it actually is easier to solo the damn things then why do you need a group?

Because it's faster with 5 people.

You pop into a zone , the mod auto groups you, the quest is done 3 minutes later with you killing NOTHING? Is that not a cheat?

No, that's leeching, and some people kick players who do that.

Why is this type of autogroup necessary?

It's not. It's to group up with others to make something easier and faster.

What you don't get is that these quests are basically dailies. Brainless, with mediocre rewards, just like back in BC. These aren't dungeons or raids. I get that you enjoy spamming trade for hours to find people to group up with, but that's just a waste of time to most people when there are better alternatives out there for quests that take mere minutes, if not seconds.
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Azardea posted...

Atralis posted...

If it actually is easier to solo the damn things then why do you need a group?

Because it's faster with 5 people.

You pop into a zone , the mod auto groups you, the quest is done 3 minutes later with you killing NOTHING? Is that not a cheat?

No, that's leeching, and some people kick players who do that.

Why is this type of autogroup necessary?

It's not. It's to group up with others to make something easier and faster.

What you don't get is that these quests are basically dailies. Brainless, with mediocre rewards, just like back in BC. These aren't dungeons or raids. I get that you enjoy spamming trade for hours to find people to group up with, but that's just a waste of time to most people when there are better alternatives out there.

You are speaking to me like I still play the game when I stopped playing it almost 10 years ago but yeah I still do understand the terminology. Why should dailies be the kind of thing where you install a mod and they become entirely trivial not just in difficulty (which they always were) but in time? If you are going to allow this mod why not just introduce a button that shows people a flash of a WoW zone in a flicker of screenshot everyday and they collect money and exp? If you are going to allow something that makes it trivial in all ways why should dailies even exist? Why not just introduce a system where every day people log in and collect their daily login bonus like a lot of games already do?

You want this reward to remain, and you want it to still require a lot of time to achieve for people without this add-on, and you want this add-on to remain effective in making achieving the reward trivial to where you admit that you could literally just pop into the zone and take a piss and in most cases it would finish itself before you were done taking a leak.

Atralis posted...

You are speaking to me like I still play the game when I stopped playing it almost 10 years ago but yeah I still do understand the terminology.

Hence the comparison to BC, which came out 12 years ago.

Why should dailies be the kind of thing where you install a mod and they become entirely trivial not just in difficulty (which they always were) but in time?

Why should the same quest you've already done 100 times before take more than a minute?
Atralis posted...

If you are going to allow this mod why not just introduce a button that shows people a flash of a WoW zone in a flicker of screenshot everyday and they collect money and exp?

You aren't teleported to the location of the quest. You still have to go there. Also, the rewards generally match the time and effort you have to put in, sooooooo...

If you are going to allow something that makes it trivial in all ways why should dailies even exist?

Like you said yourself, they've always been trivial. Why have them take way longer than they need to? It's the exact same thing as grouping up in the old days, except you don't need to waste time in trade chat.

Why not just introduce a system where every day people log in and collect their daily login bonus like a lot of games already do?

There already is a system similar to that, and it's far more lucrative than doing World Quests.
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I used to play a ton of WoW, but quit around the end of Cataclysm.

Maybe I'm nostalgic, but one of the things they added to the game that I really didn't like was the dungeon/raid finder functions. I liked it more in TBC when I would PUG runs through Karazhan, click well with some of the party members, add each other to friends lists, and end up playing together in BGs or heroics.

Like "Hey, we did really well in Kara last weekend, you feel like running Magister's Terrace?"

A lot of that seemed lost with the finder tool.
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Azardea.

My whole point is that this type of thing should either be turned into a feature or destroyed and I see no compelling reason from a gameplay perspective to turn it into a feature.

Dailies were made to give solo players, including players that enjoy group play but not all the time, something to do and some way to progress other than doing dungeons or raids. This silly kind of mod basically turns all solo content into group content but the solo content is not at all balanced in those terms so it just becomes a pure advantage that in no way changes the way you play the game but dramatically increases the in game rewards...... but it isn't a feature. It is just a cheat unless everyone has it.

It becomes an inside secret or trick. Like some kind of magic button that makes all quests complete 5 times faster without in any way altering the dynamics of how you play or requiring you to make any friends.

What a wonder. Except it adds nothing in terms of fun factor or gameplay to the people using it while detracting tremendously and wrecking balance for people not using this third party mod.

Why should this exist? Why? Actually explain it to me? What good does it do. You have said "well this content sucks anyways so why shouldn't it go 5 times faster. Why wouldn't the solution to that be to ban the mod and reduce all quest requirements by 80%? The difference there would be that you wouldn't have a % of the population in the know cheating. You would just have everyone going through content absurdly fast.

Atralis posted...

This silly kind of mod basically turns all solo content into group content

That's been a choice ever since dailies were first introduced. It's just faster to find a group now.

but dramatically increases the in game rewards

No, it reduces the time it takes to complete them. There's a difference there.

It is just a cheat unless everyone has it.

You shouldn't argue about things you don't understand. Anyone can join create groups or join groups, addon or no addon. The only change is that you save a couple of seconds every time you want to create or join a group. It's a quality of life addon. It gives no advantage whatsoever.

detracting tremendously and wrecking balance for people not using this third party mod.

...What? How does it detract in any way for people who don't use it? How does it wreck balance? Anyone can join in on killing mobs, even if others have tagged them.

Why wouldn't the solution to that be to ban the mod and reduce all quest requirements by 80%?

Wouldn't make much of a difference, sure, but why are you so against grouping up with others to complete the quests? And, again, you can still create groups for the world quests, just like you've been able to do for dailies in the past.
Atralis posted...

The difference there would be that you wouldn't have a % of the population in the know cheating.

You keep repeating that it's cheating. How in the hell is grouping up cheating?

I have to repeat what I said earlier.
Azardea posted...

You make yourself seem incredibly stupid when you argue about things you know nothing about.

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Atralis posted...

In regards to WoW.... I stopped playing WoW a long time ago but the whole point is that its an MMO. It became a lot better for solo players with auto group finding back in the day (back when I played this was still new) but what was lost was the manual group finding within servers that brought guilds into existence and some sense of community. There has to be some kind of balance between the benefits of being social and the benefits of a mindless grind in an MMO.

What? There's still an in-game cross-server group finder. There's an LFG queue that lets you automatically queue for dungeons AND raids. All this addon did was save people a few minutes of time by making world quests more convenient to finish, especially later in an expansion when few still do them. OP is right -- its an asinine thing to break for no real reason other than Blizzard yet again showing just how out of touch they are with their own community.
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Yeah, it should be mentioned that the addon really just saved you a couple clicks. The in-game system allowed you to join and create WQ groups very easily, the addon just streamlined and (I assume?) did it automatically for you.
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the answer, btw, is no. not really.
longer answer is yes, for a "player's view into the game." but not really because with that mindset it's hard to actually detach and "be a player."
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