World of Warcraft

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In ATVI's financial report today, they said that Dragonflight hasn't sold as much as Shadowlands yet:

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The population of hardcore fanboys who are addicted to doing world quests over and over or raiders who do raids over and over remains pretty stable. The big fluctuations are ex-WoW players coming back to check out the expansion launches. My guess is that Shadowlands held more appeal to people who just buy in to do the levelling quests and then unsub. It was at least visually interesting with it being set on floating islands in a sky dimension. Threads of anima trailing through the sky. Hyperspace flightpaths. That boss fight where you chase Suevanas across the chains. Shadowlands also had new factions, even if they were rather generic like blue greek angels or more fairies or more scourge or gothic vampires. The Dragon Isles don't look interesting at all. Oh look, another Borean Tundra... another forest with huge trees... and the factions are all old hat. Oh look, Centaurs! A race you already fought in Vanill and Cata. Oh look, dragons! As if they haven't already permeated the game, and Warcraft dragons are rather dull. The shift in aesthetics from 80s power metal album covers to deviantart/furaffinity stuff is probably also a turn off to people would actually be interested in Warcraft.
 
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Golfing on the Moon 1971 said:
The population of hardcore fanboys who are addicted to doing world quests over and over or raiders who do raids over and over remains pretty stable. The big fluctuations are ex-WoW players coming back to check out the expansion launches. My guess is that Shadowlands held more appeal to people who just buy in to do the levelling quests and then unsub. It was at least visually interesting with it being set on floating islands in a sky dimension. Threads of anima trailing through the sky. Hyperspace flightpaths. That boss fight where you chase Suevanas across the chains. Shadowlands also had new factions, even if they were rather generic like blue greek angels or more fairies or more scourge or gothic vampires. The Dragon Isles don't look interesting at all. Oh look, another Borean Tundra... another forest with huge trees... and the factions are all old hat. Oh look, Centaurs! A race you already fought in Vanill and Cata. Oh look, dragons! As if they haven't already permeated the game, and Warcraft dragons are rather dull. The shift in aesthetics from 80s power metal album covers to deviantart/furaffinity stuff is probably also a turn off to people would actually be interested in Warcraft.
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As someone who would come back every other expansion or so to try things out, I can say Shadowlands really killed the game for me and Blizzards doubling down on ESG bullshit made me not want to give them any money ever.

Shadowlands was an interesting concept, but it had a miserably short leveling experience and things like the Flappy Bird innovation, as well as being able to do the dungeons which had spoilers weeks before the quests for those spoilers was even open because of retarded forced time gating, really killed any desire for me to go back. I'm guessing this is what people felt like after watching the new Star Wars trilogy, as by the time you finish it, you just don't even care about what's next as things have gotten so shit.

I'm also someone who saw positives in old shit expansions, because I enjoyed the gold grinding that Garrisons allowed, I though Battle for Azeroth was neat as it had a lot of good story for me, and so forth. Though now the story has become completely retarded, and I just don't care enough to bother to gear up for raids and doing all the redundancy quests each day sounds like a nightmare. Not even the new Garrison table is rewarding, whereas at least the original one had some utility if you knew how to min-max it.

As for the setting, Centaurs and shit are a horrible idea. Not only because we've been fighting cosmic evils for multiple expansions none stop now, but also the Centaurs have been shown in depth to be useless jobbers since the start. Maybe had they actually used Shadowlands to say shit in Azeroth got all fucked up and now primordial bullshit sprouted out of the ground that might actually be an issue, then it could have made sense, but "hey, see that island that hasn't mattered for generations and has some retarded horse people on there that do nothing but scratch their own asses all day? Go fuck with them." is stupid.

To quote Rich Evans, Blizzard is creatively bankrupt and once again it's the result of anyone with talent getting the boot, while gender blobs take over, and those gender blobs can't do anything new, they can just retread existing concepts, reference pop culture, and produce shitty furry art.
 
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This is a bit of off-topic news, but it is Blizzard news so I'll put it here. Hearthstone's Mercenaries mode, which was a flop from the start, will be put into maintenance mode, just like many other Blizzard games:

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It looks like the NetEase break-up is really putting a strain on their finances. And this leaves only two game modes left in Hearthstone that Blizzard is officially supporting, Standard format and Battlegrounds.
 
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Golfing on the Moon 1971 said:
The population of hardcore fanboys who are addicted to doing world quests over and over or raiders who do raids over and over remains pretty stable. The big fluctuations are ex-WoW players coming back to check out the expansion launches. My guess is that Shadowlands held more appeal to people who just buy in to do the levelling quests and then unsub. It was at least visually interesting with it being set on floating islands in a sky dimension. Threads of anima trailing through the sky. Hyperspace flightpaths. That boss fight where you chase Suevanas across the chains. Shadowlands also had new factions, even if they were rather generic like blue greek angels or more fairies or more scourge or gothic vampires. The Dragon Isles don't look interesting at all. Oh look, another Borean Tundra... another forest with huge trees... and the factions are all old hat. Oh look, Centaurs! A race you already fought in Vanill and Cata. Oh look, dragons! As if they haven't already permeated the game, and Warcraft dragons are rather dull. The shift in aesthetics from 80s power metal album covers to deviantart/furaffinity stuff is probably also a turn off to people would actually be interested in Warcraft.
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It's the same trick that Blizzard has always done in recent years.

"The last expansion kind of sucked, we're sorry!"
"We're listening to the players this time! We've got <COMMUNITY OUTREACH> going on!"
"We're bringing back <OLD THING> and <REQUESTED FEATURE>" (talent trees, tier armor)
"We're moving away from <BORROWED POWER>/<INTRUSTIVE SYSTEMS>"

and then the game launches, they half ass (or no ass) every promise, stick in a bunch of bullshit retention systems/borrowed power, throw together a shitty story and then rush out the next expansion. What likely killed Dragonflight was Shadowlands only having 2 major content patches across two entire years with three raids to try and fill the gap. Dragonflight looked to be pretty content light at launch and there's no reason to think that Blizzard is going to be putting out quality content patches anytime soon. It's also much harder to sustain now that other games are doing what WoW does drastically better.
 
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Thiletonomics said:
This is a bit of off-topic news, but it is Blizzard news so I'll put it here. Hearthstone's Mercenaries mode, which was a flop from the start, will be put into maintenance mode, just like many other Blizzard games:

View attachment 4466209

It looks like the NetEase break-up is really putting a strain on their finances. And this leaves only two game modes left in Hearthstone that Blizzard is officially supporting, Standard format and Battlegrounds.
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Mercs was too grindy for its own good, never truly integrated to the rest of the game, and the first game mode that was primarily pay-to-win. It was probably fun if you were willing to drop $100 on the newest mercenaries every three months, but for the rest of us, not so much.
 
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Stab You in the Back said:
Mercs was too grindy for its own good, never truly integrated to the rest of the game, and the first game mode that was primarily pay-to-win. It was probably fun if you were willing to drop $100 on the newest mercenaries every three months, but for the rest of us, not so much.
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It didn't help that all the slow dialogue wasn't something you could skip in my experience, and that's just a huge pain of Hearthstone where you can't just click to skip the blabbing.
 
Thiletonomics said:
In ATVI's financial report today, they said that Dragonflight hasn't sold as much as Shadowlands yet:

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I have however read that retention is higher. They still make fucking bank and I don't recall last they scaled things down over finances and not lack of vision (HotS etc).

I remember Shadowlands being marketed in this classic "Horde v Alliance" return to form and how many celebrities were paid to market it. It broke quite a few milestones compared to previous expansions so it is quite literally measuring against 'the best' (since Wrath?).

MMORPGs in general are just reduced to a niche. It's a good genre to fall back on when you've nothing else, instead of having to scout for new games constantly, but in terms of being the "all your needs in one place" of Classic? Eh. Everyone is already in 50 Discords and have no reason to engage with anyone if not to just berate them for having a low rating in an artificial system enforced by addons.
 
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So whatever happened to that totally real balance pass they were totally going to get around to doing? That's all any of my acquaintances that actually fell for Blizz's latest bout of faking sincerity talked about.
 
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Lou's Sentient Backfat said:
So whatever happened to that totally real balance pass they were totally going to get around to doing? That's all any of my acquaintances that actually fell for Blizz's latest bout of faking sincerity talked about.
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Something, something, cost a raid tier. Just as likely they never even started on the work and were hoping people would forget.
 
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Lou's Sentient Backfat said:
So whatever happened to that totally real balance pass they were totally going to get around to doing? That's all any of my acquaintances that actually fell for Blizz's latest bout of faking sincerity talked about.
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By the LOW LOW STANDARDS of post Legion WoW they have been doing an awful lot actually. 10.0.5 actually had some reasonable reworks for a few classes that fixed some problems which is something they never, ever do outside of real content patches.

BUT DID I MENTION THE STANDARDS ARE LOW

That said, it's pretty clear that Blizzard hates fucking hunters and if you play them you should just reroll now. All 3 specs of hunter finally overtook Balance Druid on eternally ignored hellclass.
 
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Oddjob OTP said:
That said, it's pretty clear that Blizzard hates fucking hunters and if you play them you should just reroll now. All 3 specs of hunter finally overtook Balance Druid on eternally ignored hellclass.
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Really? The hunter in my raid and mplus is pretty much topping dps.

I'm enjoying that the made assassination rogue aoe balanced to other rogue specs.
 
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GenociderSyo said:
Really? The hunter in my raid and mplus is pretty much topping dps.

I'm enjoying that the made assassination rogue aoe balanced to other rogue specs.
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I don't necessarily mean their damage is bad (although it is outside of burst AoE which tends to be the most important especially in M+) but that their class is awkward to play, their trees are a mess, they have 0 utility outside of BL and their rooting arrow and turtle being able to do immunity soaks and probably the worst survivability overall. They also are incredibly buggy in spite of the fact that the hunter community is extraordinarily autistic and posts all of the bugs on their discords and the external sites that people file WoW bugs on in the hopes that Blizzard will do something about them (they don't).
 
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Been reading this topic out of nostalgia.
Quit in 2017 but every time I see WoW mentioned I miss the glory days, for me 2006-2011 or so.
By 2007 in BC it used to be a nearly ideal online meritocracy simulator, at least if you were raiding properly like I was.
Comically enough, I did a 2 months return to BC Classic, and the content was indeed piss-easy and all the former community and merit-simulation was over, and neckbeards were running the same raid with gold bidding for items, essentially ruining the game completely.
Proper cynical ending for what used to be the pinnacle of online fun for me.
 
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