it's sad, but it's gonna be hilarious what blizzard's gonna do when they run out of memberberries, especially when their new dragon race is any indication of their "creativity"...
Since Legion they were burning through stuff that could be entire expansions at rapid pace.
Legion.
Emerald nightmare/dream and Xavius.
Argus
Bfa
Zandalar
Kultiras
Nazjathar .
Nzoth.
In Shadowlands they brought back many popular characters . And even turned Anduin into Arthas 2.0.
Idk about dragonflight , becauce all I know about it is it exists.
And Dragon isle was planned and cut location for vanilla WoW
For some of the WoW population, the tokens are indeed essentially "free". When I quit in 2017 I sold all the stuff I had, from pets to all sorts of lunacy, and converted all the gold to tokens to Bnet balance. I played on and off from 2006 or so, with large pauses including full expansions like MoP and WotLK, and I still managed to get an obscene amount of Euros in the Bnet account... and I never, ever farmed gold.
I did take part in guild carries though, and had a proper garrison in WoD, so gold just kept on pouring.
For players like how I was, gold and tokens were basically "free", obtained by simply playing the game as we would have done anyway. There's not much to do for a guild in the top 500 (let's say...) after they clear a raid. You take people to carry, so you don't waste the gear the drops and benefits nobody, which happens more and more with each clear.
Now maybe things have changed since Legion, it's been 6 years, but back then this is how things were.
Some people would just spend on those expensive mounts and all sorts of trading card game stuff (?), but I never really cared about either, so yup, you just get a LOT of gold.
The reason Arthas was datamined in game is the new mega dungeon will involve an alternate timeline where Uther not Arthas is the lich king and Vereesa not Sylvanas is the Banshee Queen.
sadly i think it is too little too late. They could have done this as an expansion tbh and people would have hopped on this quickly. Instead it's just some meh scenerios hoping to trigger memberberries and 3 months amount of subs and make the higher ups happy. I dislike people like Doron because they are simps and just gas up the community into having higher expectations. Even Azmagold one of Blizzard's biggest defenders is now cynical of every aspect of the game and tbh when people like that go, you have kinda lost.
As for the wow coin in classic modes now, again no surprises there. the game is well past their cash cow phase so every action that draws revenue will be done now. I think the wow team think that because there has been no negative press on DF that it means all is forgiven and forgot but it's the opposite. They think they can announce their void or whatever expansion in November and be met with instant praise. It won't, most people are apathetic including myself and once you reach that phase of life cycle then it's a hard decline phase. You have to attract returning players on top of current players but also make the game attractive to new players.
Classic phases a different issue and that is server numbers and faction sizes. If a server loses players then it has an effect on raiding and servers having their raid groups die.
Blizzard is so dead as a company that it has no talent left as they were all old guard and gone and it has the relationship with its audience of a battered housewife. I honestly can see no clear way the game can even return. Relying on nostalgia is retarded and only gets you so far because it is limited.
The reason Arthas was datamined in game is the new mega dungeon will involve an alternate timeline where Uther not Arthas is the lich king and Vereesa not Sylvanas is the Banshee Queen.
It can come back pretty easily, it would just need clear direction from the top and a few solid updates. A lot of WoW's problems aren't that deep - which is why it's so frustrating for players.
Just off the top of my head
- Come off the design decision of 3 specs per class (doubly so with Evoker only having 2) and remove garbage specs and move those tools into other specs (aka Rogues lose Subelty and those tools move into Assassination/Combat)
- Remove garrisons and update them with some level of player/guild housing. The infrastructure is already there, just remove the garrison part and just plop down the default Inn and a few shops. Just give WoD players access to all overworld perks associated with garrisons.
- Rework a few old dungeons and raids for a decent leveling progression for new players - for a more action packed and educational progression experience. Move some important/fun skills lower in the leveling progression so lower dungeons aren't terrible.
- More raids, even "out of progression" ones. One shots, reworks, even test/prototype versions of bosses. The game is geared around raiding, so do more raiding.
- Attack cheaters viciously instead of the terrible approach we currently have.
WoW - as much as I persoanlly dislike it - isn't a bad game at it's core. It's a decent game that's been horribly mismanaged by a dying a company for nearly a decade.
Blizzard is so dead as a company that it has no talent left as they were all old guard and gone and it has the relationship with its audience of a battered housewife. I honestly can see no clear way the game can even return. Relying on nostalgia is retarded and only gets you so far because it is limited.
Personally, I haven't played any Blizzard game in some time now. I did tip my toes into Shadowlands and Dragonflight but never stuck around long enough to keep paypigging them.
It can come back pretty easily, it would just need clear direction from the top and a few solid updates. A lot of WoW's problems aren't that deep - which is why it's so frustrating for players.
Just off the top of my head
- Come off the design decision of 3 specs per class (doubly so with Evoker only having 2) and remove garbage specs and move those tools into other specs (aka Rogues lose Subelty and those tools move into Assassination/Combat)
- Remove garrisons and update them with some level of player/guild housing. The infrastructure is already there, just remove the garrison part and just plop down the default Inn and a few shops. Just give WoD players access to all overworld perks associated with garrisons.
- Rework a few old dungeons and raids for a decent leveling progression for new players - for a more action packed and educational progression experience. Move some important/fun skills lower in the leveling progression so lower dungeons aren't terrible.
- More raids, even "out of progression" ones. One shots, reworks, even test/prototype versions of bosses. The game is geared around raiding, so do more raiding.
- Attack cheaters viciously instead of the terrible approach we currently have.
WoW - as much as I persoanlly dislike it - isn't a bad game at it's core. It's a decent game that's been horribly mismanaged by a dying a company for nearly a decade.
As you said, it's a management problem. The game has inherently been ruined over the years by higher level design catastrophes. I would say the game's simply lost all sight of what it wants to be. They invest a ton of developer time every expansion making a massive and detailed world with quests that people run once and then never again. Meanwhile, they're stingy with the number of dungeons they make each expansion and resort to infinite power scaling mythic plus systems to distract the players from the repetitive nature of it all. PvP seems to be a complete after thought with hardly any effort thrown into it. The raids are quite good but they gave up on making a coherent narrative to keep the player interested in the story.
If we were to break down the game by the amount of time players spend on any given activity and the development time it takes, I suspect we'd end up finding that players are spending 80+ percent of their time in instanced content and a small fraction out in the world. Blizzard has been sinking resources into bringing the world back to life, but I just don't think that's what the players want anymore. Given the choice, would you rather have 3 new dungeons each patch or another shitty open world area? It isn't as if the story is worth following. Ever since the WoD time travel fuckup, the story has been about as lucid as the marvel cinematic universe with world ending threats arbitrarily shat out and defeated.
The importance of the world in WoW has always been because of the importance of leveling content. Back in the old-old days, you'd spend hundreds of hours leveling a character up to maximum level. A large percentage of your playtime, equal to months for your casual audience, was spent questing and doing leveling dungeons. The game has evolved beyond that point now. No one wants to spend 300 hours at the start of each new expansion going up 10 levels. Instead, you rush to the new level cap in a few dozen hours at most and then start farming for your end game gear in the instances. Is it sensible for blizzard to devote massive development resources to this quickly trivialized content while the main attraction gets constant rehashes?
I think, at its core, the problem is just resource allocation and the lack of any coherent concept of what WoW should be. We can complain about loss of class identity, shitty lore, abandonware PvP support, the repetitive mythic plus system, and long content patch cycles til the servers get unplugged. Without a clear vision moving forward, blizzard will continue to mindlessly throw away developer efforts on throwaway content and reinvent the systems wheel every expansion. That said, it's not exactly hard to figure this shit out. The lead blizzard devs are just incompetent and the company has been bleeding its best talent for a decade now with other Californian studios like Riot poaching their employees with substantially better compensation. But hey, I'm sure replacing all of the in-game portraits of scantily clad women with fruit bowls is a better use of their time than fixing the flagrant botting problem.
The importance of the world in WoW has always been because of the importance of leveling content. Back in the old-old days, you'd spend hundreds of hours leveling a character up to maximum level. A large percentage of your playtime, equal to months for your casual audience, was spent questing and doing leveling dungeons. The game has evolved beyond that point now. No one wants to spend 300 hours at the start of each new expansion going up 10 levels. Instead, you rush to the new level cap in a few dozen hours at most and then start farming for your end game gear in the instances. Is it sensible for blizzard to devote massive development resources to this quickly trivialized content while the main attraction gets constant rehashes?
it's one of the reasons I loath linear progression, especially in a way WoW does it since it has never evolved at all. all the way back with WOTLK it was obvious how retarded this shit is gonna be longterm, yet here we are a decade later.
all blizzard really had to do is decouple levels from the world, it's really not rocket science. even if retards whine about MUH LORE and MUH POWER PROGRESSION, it still beats everything that's in the game now.
it would also make it easier to design said world since they wouldn't have to constantly fix shitty gameplay symptoms and could a proper storyline the way FF14 does it (and even ff14 falls into similar pitfalls as WoW). there's a reason chink-gatchas like genshin shit all over WoW in money and popularity...
I think the problem with an MMO like WoW is they made it have a defined objective.
I get that it's important for a game to have goals in it to give players objects, as even Minecraft has the Ender Dragon or whatever, but WoW fails as an MMO because raiding and now Mythic plus are the objectives that define the game so much that everything else is meaningless by comparison. Had they not doubled down on those aspects and rather made the game as a whole have a lot more meat and ways of achieving a sense of victory, they wouldn't have such a shit game right now.
The only reason the open world doesn't matter is because they made it not matter, and continue to reduce its relevance so that it's a waste of time and not something to enjoy.
I'll ask a simple question. Why do they keep expanding the world? One of the problems we keep rehashing over and over and over again is that the world feels empty and that nothing feels grounded. They could go down an alternate route for world and story progression by continually remaking existing zones as they move the story and game forward. Keep a phased version of the old zones around if people want to explore the old, pre-revamp content, but try to keep everyone on the same page from day-1 if you want to be an endgame focused mmo. It's easier to just reposition some npc's, add a quest here and there, and remake a bit of the map than try to keep adding brand new massive zones that will summarily be forgotten about in a few months. I remember Duskwood quite fondly, and would've happily gone back to the zone later on. I never wanted to see another minute of the Hellfire Peninsula after the 5th character that had to level through it. How much of the old world is still permanently stuck on the crappy cataclysm patches? Blizzard is so embarrassed by the old material that they funnel new players to battle for azeroth rather than let them witness how out of date 90% of the game is (assuming they don't just buy a level boost).
While we're at it, guild/player housing is and has always been one of the worst ideas for mmo's. It actively takes players out of the public spaces and into yet more instances. Players also can't be allowed to have fixed objects in the world. Archage housing shortages and garish buildings were evidence enough of that. As a compromise and a way to promote world pvp, why don't we have guild airships/wagons/etc. that emerge from specific spawnpoints? Let a guild make a vessel and take it to the public guild vs. guild pvp area for ICC lootship type battles. The mechanics are already in the game and you can enable various pre-selected customizations to either monetize or add in as guild progression.
While on the topic of unshitting pvp, pvp battlegrounds feel utterly disconnected from the world. Remember the battle of gilneas? Did they use the awesome cityscape from the leveling zone? No... they made a shitty capture the flag map that felt like a crappier version of Arathi Basin. They can't even reuse their own assets properly.
I have a theory. WoW is ran by its art teams. Incapable of just reusing old assets and cleaning shit up to focus on gameplay, they insist on making massive new zones, instances, and furry and elf races. Seriously, why are there 6 unique furry races and 4 elf reskins in the character creation menu? Whose fetish is this? I would claim it's also ran by the lore team, but a brief scan of the blizzard merchandise store reveals no Sylvanas body pillow.
On a lighter note, who remembers the great mmochampion worgen alpha furry threads? Because, of course, there were multiple ones. The longest of these was 130 pages and 2599 posts about why the worgen weren't sexy enough and should look more like anthro fap-bait. Link for the interested. There were also multiple threads on the blizzard forums.
Garrosh was the best thing WoW had in a long time along with the Blackfuse Company. Even in the Thrall cheating cinematic he had the perfect point and was fondly remembered, but because good villains can't exist in modern media as it might cause wrong think, we'll never see something like him again.
Hell, they could have even had something fun with a third faction or a danger zone created by Garrosh holding Orgrimmar long term, but nope they need to return to status quo instead of making Senjin Village the capitol or something. That's a prime example of game mechanics ruining story and design potential in the worst way possible.
I have a theory. WoW is ran by its art teams. Incapable of just reusing old assets and cleaning shit up to focus on gameplay, they insist on making massive new zones, instances, and furry and elf races. Seriously, why are there 6 unique furry races and 4 elf reskins in the character creation menu? Whose fetish is this? I would claim it's also ran by the lore team, but a brief scan of the blizzard merchandise store reveals no Sylvanas body pillow.
Leveling takes a back seat because the big "headline" getting events are the World First races and Arena eSports and new systems are added to put something on the box.
Marketing would not allow something to be put out as "We didn't add anything major!" - hence the focus on new areas, new raids, new systems, new story, and so on. It probably ties into the critical reception of Cataclysm.
While we're at it, guild/player housing is and has always been one of the worst ideas for mmo's. It actively takes players out of the public spaces and into yet more instances
It isn't really though. WoW in particular has it's playerbase wanting to do more things on a guild level and this would fit the bill. WoW needs more "hanging out" content so that would fit the bill.
You could just have instanced neighborhoods similar to FFXIV - you don't need to have Star Wars Galaxies levels of control. Just some type of place for people to congregate that isn't in a single mass near the main city's auction house.
I'm having a little playing the new diablo event but I haven't leveled to 60 at all. However the raid groups made just for the goblins is pretty annoying, Blizzard should at least get more than one goblin to spawn.
I have deeply, deeply enjoyed all of the denialism about gold-buying that then quickly bleeds into, "Well, yeah, but it's Blizzard's fault for letting me spend $200 a week on it!"
I dropped off classic before TBC because this kind of shit was everywhere even then. And being real - I do not personally give a shit if you're retarded enough to shell out to PF Chang for gold. But the players who do that tend to also be absolutely fucking obnoxious, and thus most people who were playing the (braindead retarded 3-button-rotation) game to have a good time and relax (and not to run away from their impending midlife crisis) have for a while now been back on pservers.
The reason Arthas was datamined in game is the new mega dungeon will involve an alternate timeline where Uther not Arthas is the lich king and Vereesa not Sylvanas is the Banshee Queen.
Why not an Alternative Timeline with THRALL FINALLY FUCKING JAINA and becoming a Haren Protagonist instead of a weak cuck? No? Can be Garrosh instead, "hatefucking" probably is fetish of someone in the staff? No?
Don't worry, after a long development cycle we'll all get plenty of content of people looking at the leaks that came out post cancelation of the project.
