Current Events > Blizzard finally listens to it's players after lawsuit hell

(+) Yeah! (+)

From a blue post:

Tl;dr
We are now making changes players asked for since beta of Shadowlands back in 2020.

Smh

While we hope many players will be pleased at the increased accessibility and freedom for experimentation these changes will permit, we know that you might be wondering why we didnt make adjustments like these sooner. After all, a large portion of the community has been vocal about wanting to see changes along these lines since mid-2020, when Shadowlands was still in Beta.

When it comes to the limitations on Covenant-switching, millions of players experienced Shadowlands for the first time through the lens of their Covenant of choice, and that would have not been possible had the choice carried less weight from the outset. Nevertheless, after the conclusion of the Chains of Domination campaign, the Covenants are united against the Jailer, and revisiting player feedback in that context has led us to re-evaluate our approach. In terms of the day-to-day player experience, the advantages of a rigid division between Covenants have diminished since Shadowlands launched, while the downsides (feeling disadvantaged in certain types of content, or having to choose between mechanical advantages and aesthetics) have only grown. That balance of factors no longer justifies the original limitations on Covenant-switching, so in 9.1.5 were looking to provide a way to circumvent them.
Conduit Energy, however, is a different story. The system simply has not played out the way we hoped it would.

We should have heeded community feedback and taken a different direction a year ago. A majority of players largely ignore the system and are unaffected by it, while the minority who want to engage in multiple content types competitively feel constrained by it. Overall, that adds up to a negative experience. Conduit Energy isnt really making the game better in any appreciable way, so were removing the system entirely.
As for the Covenant campaign skip for alts and the ability to freely swap Covenants on alts, that change is one outgrowth of many ongoing discussions within the development team, focused on feedback that at times players feel that the WoW content they most enjoy is locked behind experiences that arent nearly as appealing to them. Some of that feedback revolves around different playstyles and content types, but a consistent theme is that experiences that were fun the first time through start to lose their luster on repeat playthroughs on alts, especially when required for power progression. So just as the Threads of Fate system exists to allow players to skip the level-up zone narrative on subsequent playthroughs, we want to give max-level players a similar option to avoid having to replay a Covenant campaign theyve already done.
As the 9.1.5 PTR progresses, we hope to roll out several other changes aimed at giving you more flexibility in choosing how you prefer to adventure in Azeroth. Well have more details to follow as we finalize our plans. Stay tuned for full PTR notes in the near future, and we look forward to discussion and feedback to guide us in our ongoing improvements to World of Warcraft.
The World of Warcraft Team

Please come back...

No can do, blizzard.

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I thought they were going to stop sexually harassing women......

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LordMarshal posted...

I thought they were going to stop sexually harassing women......

Now why would they so that?

LordMarshal posted...

I thought they were going to stop sexually harassing women......

THIS
TC you raised my hopes

Too little too late.

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Ruvan22 posted...

THIS
TC you raised my hopes

My bad

X to doubt

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WoW certainly could recover like FFXIV recovered from its bad start, but the problem is FFXIV is a game made by humans while current WoW is a game made by a marketing department.

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Activision listen to the community? Pfft, if they hadnt fired all the community managers that actually tried listening to the community last year maybe people would believe them.

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This post sums it up.

5h

Its all good stuff, but I refuse to congratulate you for listening to us. You want a pat on the back for that? Invent a time machine, travel back a year, and tell the developers to do all this BEFORE the game launches rather than as a mid expansion band aid.
And why the salt?
Because you keep doing this. You keep introducing systems you have no hope of balancing, which fight against us, which waste our time, which offer horrible grinds and then you fight us as much as you can in changing them until as close to the end of the expansion as possible and THEN, THEN you fix them only to toss it all out in the trash with the next expansion and to begin repeating the cycle.
The only reason these changes are coming now is nothing to do with the lore, or the narrative, or how impactful the Covenant system was at the beginning. Its because millions of players have voted with their feet and theyve left and this is an attempt to show you are capable of listening. Which this does, you are indeed capable of listening.
When your backs are against the wall and you are bleeding subscribers faster than youd like.
So I will take these changes. I will even acknowledge that they are good changes. But I wont thank you for them because these should have been in place since launch and it was the arrogance of the dev team which blinded them to the fact that what they were introducing was going to end up in a horrible mess.
You want plaudits? You want thanks? You want the adulation of your community? Then take this as a lesson learned and apply it to 10.0. If whatever expansion comes next doesnt require a mid expansion dismantling of your failed systems as Shadowlands AND Battle for Azeroth have both done, THEN youll get some thanks because youll have done something.
I will not gush over someone cleaning up the mess they made when they were told repeatedly not to go and make that mess and they arrogantly went ahead anyway.

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Has nothing to do with the lawsuit; people were leaving for FF14 in droves before news ever broke on that

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Dakimakura posted...

FFXIV is a game made by humans while current WoW is a game made by a marketing department.

Wtf does this even mean lol

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Dakimakura posted...

WoW certainly could recover like FFXIV recovered from its bad start, but the problem is FFXIV is a game made by humans while current WoW is a game made by a marketing department.

Yes FF14 is made with love by the small indie dev Square Enix

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TheRadiant posted...

Yes FF14 is made with love by the small indie dev Square Enix

It is compared to Activision

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Shezarr posted...

Wtf does this even mean lol

One of these things is fun. One of these things is what market research suggests is fun enough to keep subs.

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They need to be worshiping the ground their remaining players walk on, at this point. People have been dissatisfied with the game at various levels for years, but the one-two punch of BfA and SL has proven that even 16 year loyalists have a breaking point.

It took like 80% of major WoW content creators making huge announcements that they're either quitting or no longer covering WoW (with most of them switching outright to FFXIV) before they realized they've been slowly wearing down every ounce of good faith they built up in the vanilla/tbc/wotlk glory days.

How can a company be this inept? I will never know. I just hope they start getting their shit together and making huge changes to internal practices, design philosophy, and gameplay focus. They've needed to drop the "engagement metrics" way of thinking for over six years now, but it made them money. I guess these recent subscriber losses, plus the huge blows to their reputation, have necessitated, oh...I dunno... actually trying to make the game more fun for the players?

Novel concept, I know.

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I was hoping this would be about them fixing WC3

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Man is this really what it takes for these big corporations to listen to people?

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What happens to WC4?

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Can someone explain the problem that is being addressed here? Not a WoW player.

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Gobstoppers12 posted...

How can a company be this inept? I will never know.

@Gobstoppers12
Did you like... ignore the toxic culture, rampant harassment and brodude fratboy bosses?

Jerry_Hellyeah posted...

Can someone explain the problem that is being addressed here? Not a WoW player.

Shadowlands introduced a system called Covenants. Covenants are the four different factions of the afterlife and you have to ally yourself with one of them. Each Covenant has their own questline and cosmetics to unlock which is all fine.

What wasn't fine is that each Covenant also granted you a couple of new abilities. The instant they revealed this system at Blizzcon, virtually every player saw the immediate issue: they would be impossible to balance. This issue was further compounded by the Soulbind system. It's essentially a talent tree with each covenant having a few different ones to choose from.

When you join a Covenant, you're locked into that Covenant. If you try and swap, you lose all progress you've made and have to start over with the new one. If you ever try to switch back, you have to complete a long-ass quest twice and you can only do it once per week.

I mentioned the Covenants being unbalanced. There's the obvious situation where one Covenant is stronger than another. This was the first big problem because that's where the cosmetic side and the power side clash. I played a warlock, a class fantasy that involves summoning demons, infecting enemies with curses and disease, and raining demonic fire on their head. My best Covenant was not the vampiric Venthyr or the shambling undead of Maldraxxus. It was the nature-loving fairies of the Night Fae.

The less obvious situation is that one Covenant is not always the best for your class. Sometimes what's best for one talent specialization is not the best for the others. A quick glance at a shaman guide tells me that their best healing Covenant is their worst one for their melee spec. And if that's not enough, the best Covenant also depends on what type of content you're doing. What's best for doing 25-man PvE encounters might not be what's best for 5-man PvE encounters might not be what's best for 20v20 PvP might not be what's best for 2v2 PvP. And to top all of that off, balance patches and the like might change all of that even more.

So you have a system that locks you into one choice, actively makes it a pain in the ass to change that choice, makes you feel bad for either weakening your character or for picking cosmetics you don't like, often isn't even the universal best choice, and then can be completely changed if Blizzard decides to move some numbers around. And as the post in the OP said, this is something people were pointing out as a problem in the beta of the expansion.

The real topper is that this isn't even the only major problem with this expansion.

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Shezarr posted...

Wtf does this even mean lol

Passion-driven vs. Profit-driven, I'd assume

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WingsOfGood posted...

Did you like... ignore the toxic culture, rampant harassment and brodude fratboy bosses?

I mean, those things are what they are, but they were acting like that even back in the early 2010s when the game was still pretty good. That's its own separate issue that needs to be rectified. It's also more fuel for the fire; they're so inept that their HR department basically just let the bro-culture scare off a lot of the genuinely good workers who didn't want to take part anymore.

The exodus of employees started a long time ago, really. They just picked up speed more and more as the corporate attitude wove itself deeper into the development system. As the focus shifted from fun design/interesting stories, and leaned more into engagement metrics and weekly/daily checklists, the people who wanted to make good games just straight left and went to make better games with other developers.

Maybe I'm just old fashioned, I don't know. I miss when games succeeded based on word of mouth and naturally addictive gameplay instead of artificial treadmill mechanics that make you fall behind irrevocably if you miss one day of grinding the 5 arbitrary systems present in every new expansion.

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this has been happening for a while

as much as the community fawns over Legion (and I'm one of them) the systems were dog at launch, when legendaries were horrifically unbalances for most classes, totally random, and gotten as a result of even more tedious busy work. they eventually fixed it later on in the expac so everyone forgot

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Everyone knew this was going to happen before 9.0 launched, that's the problem. This isn't Blizzard finally listening to their players, it's them following a pattern. Launch the expansion with a bunch of time-wasting BS to pad engagement numbers. As people quit and the regulars get fed up with the chores, finally reverse course in 9.1.5 or 9.2. Pretend you are the savior. Repeat in 10.0.

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Delirious_Beard posted...

as much as the community fawns over Legion (and I'm one of them) the systems were dog at launch

Legion was great primarily because of the enormous amount of story and questing content. Not only did each class have a unique order hall campaign, but each spec within the class had a different artifact with different lore and a different quest to obtain it. Plus, once you earned your artifact, it was very fun to fill in the slots and get access to a variety of cool active and passive bonus features. Not to mention all the extra appearances, hidden traits, etc. that came along with the Artifact itself.

Arcane Mages, Demonology Warlocks, and Shadow Priests had weapons that would talk to them, for example. Holy paladins could get a hammer that looked a lot like Reinhardt's hammer from Overwatch, and it added an extra graphic to divine shield.

Stuff like that makes the game fun. It enforces class/spec identity without putting you on rails.

The sheer amount of flavor and story content in Legion is unrivaled by any other expansion, except maybe Classic, which had the advantage of tapping into the entire world and all the lore from WC1, 2, and 3 for the first time ever.

But, like you said...Legion had some really detrimental systems. Legendary farming was on one hand enticing and rewarding, and it encouraged people to keep running dungeons and completing world quests for a worthwhile reward--but the RNG meant you either got your BiS legendary within two weeks, or you got one of the trash "any class" legendaries after a month and a half. Personally I had a good experience with legendaries because I wasn't trying to min-max or push Mythic raids, I was just enjoying making new characters and getting power spikes whenever a legendary would drop.

The main thing I hated about Legion, though, was the actual class design in terms of rotations. Especially for hunters (my favorite class.) I didn't play a hunter for 80% of Legion. That's because I fucking hated what they did to MM hunters, BM hunters, AND survival hunters in terms of rotations and proc-based damage.

I did mostly Arcane Mage, because it actually felt like the style I enjoyed. Big crits, simple rotations, with some special utility on top. Legion's class design was plagued sooo badly with proc-based damage spikes (frost mages were just fucking loaded with procs) and vulnerability window shit (like MM hunters needing a proc to fire a marked shot which THEN empowered Aimed Shot to do its "real damage" for ~10 seconds or so)...the problem with proc-based and vulnerability-window based DPS design...is that when you don't get your procs and aren't in a vulnerability window, your damage is fucking trash.

Meanwhile, Arcane Mages dealt their full damage all the time and didn't heavily rely on vulnerability setups or random procs (apart from free arcane missiles to prolong mana conservation), so they were actually really fun for me to play.

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Yeah, Legion had its downfalls, but it also had a lot of good to make up for it. BFA and Shadowlands adopted all the shitty aspects of Legion, made them worse, and were then also just shit in other ways.

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lol

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pegusus123456 posted...

BFA and Shadowlands adopted all the shitty aspects of Legion, made them worse, and were then also just shit in other ways.

BFA was in a shitty position, to be fair. It had to follow up on Legion's extreme abundance of class identity and lore content--any expansion, no matter what it was, would have seemed disappointing after Legion. They cashed out so many huge story lines and delivered so many different payoffs of ten+ years of anticipation. The Scythe of Elune, for example. That thing has been part of the deep lore of WoW since Classic's earliest quest chains in Duskwood. Ashbringer being in a player's hands is the same way. Every paladin has wanted that sword since vanilla.

Illidan's return. Seeing the demon stronghold of Argus for the first time. Sargeras making his move and using his planet-piercing blade to impale Azeroth. Alleria and Turalyon returning decades after Warcraft II. Not to mention dozens upon dozens of other legendary/lore-significant characters, weapons, and story lines coming to proper conclusions...

It was like the Endgame of WoW. An expansion like Legion can literally never happen again. There just aren't enough dangling plot threads and lore characters left to make anything as grand and far-reaching as Legion was.

So now we're stuck floundering in the aftermath waiting for something interesting to come around, but every new revelation is just boring and uninspired. Just about all of the old lore has been accounted for and wrapped up. The only thing left is new lore, and the new lore kinda fucking sucks.

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BFA immediately wasted and ruined the Old Gods and the Naga while setting up little in the way of new lore though.

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LordMarshal posted...

I thought they were going to stop sexually harassing women......

Who would do that? Smack dat ass then tell them to make you a sandwich.

will they have catgirls? no? ffxiv it is

Kaiganeer posted...

will they have catgirls? no? ffxiv it is

https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/p7f9uw/what_the_ff_is_that/

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Catgirls

A day late and a dollar short