well said.

 

-----signature-----

Agreed

 

-----signature-----

Triple that.


If they had just repackaged it and called it WoW2 and left the original WoW going, then collected demographics on player segments of each, at least it would have been a market-driven business decision. Changing the game to attract new customers while not understanding the negative impact on their current customer base.... it appears to be half-or-poorly thought out, or perhaps a decision based on someone's personal agenda (not a sustainable successful management style in today's market, Steve Jobs notwithstanding), or arrogant at the least (our customers will stick with us no matter what we do, they always have, we know best.)


In the end, all supposition aside, I'm still not sure whether this is intentional incompetence, or not.

 

-----signature-----

Agreed again. I don't think Blizz as a whole understands that WoW is an entertainment experience, and needs to be managed as such.


Cat was as if I went back to Disneyland for the umpteenth time, and found the castle entrance torn down and replaced with something else. or went to see Star Trek 8 in a movie theater and found cowboys and pistols instead of spaceships and phasers. Or a star wars movie with phasers instead of light sabers. It just violates the basic assumptions, turns the world into something different. Left me with no reason to stay.


Comment I've made many times since WoW launched: there is a basic, basic marketing skill of understanding who your customers are and segmenting them appropriately, and then testing your design decisions (including proposed changes) against each segment to see who it's going to alienate and who will love it. Then you make a business decision. Blizz made a business decision to trust the intuition of a committee who knew they'd committed to a risky path, without doing the business basic.


I've worked for a Fortune 50 company for over 30 years. I have seen executives make mistakes of this magnitude. Sometimes it takes a while to understand that it was really a mistake and not a risk gone awry, but in every single case that executive was gone inside of 5 years. The old school management had a philosophy of firing not just the guy who it looked like made the blunder, but also the next two levels of management to be sure the real culprit was gone.


Which brings me to the last point. GC needs to go. But it smells like Cat didn't come from his imagination, but rather from a set of directives from above he was too weak (or too ignorant) to resist. Just replacing GC isn't good enough. Blizz's board of directors needs to clean house.


BTW the person who ghost wrote GC's latest blog post actually understands what needs to be done, maybe they should be put in a position of more power.

THIS

 

-----signature-----

Indeed.

They messed with a portion of the game that I found very very fun, which was fine tuning and tweaking my talent trees. Anyone who graced the Rogue forums knows I loved building trees, testing builds, and giving advice on those builds. Taking that away from me took away some of the fun for me. This is why I started playing Rift as well.

 

-----signature-----

I could ramble beyond what Gaddafi did at the UN some long time ago about reasons for decline, but in the end, who gives a damn ^^.

I'll just toss in the crap with Blizzard executives' "We think the players should blabla".
They kept forcing perspectives onto the players, most of the time with unreasonable changes.

I lost count on how many diverse class specs and stuff like that were guted and "dumbed down" - and I dare say Blizzard even invented that crap.

And then there was the trillions of class revamps that frequently (fail)cascaded into another revamp of the revamping revamped revamp. Then we hear the stupid scissors rock paper theory and how great it will be, when nobody there really knows who of classes are rock, paper or scissors.

Then then were brainiac moments in the design.
(mage rant here)
We have moments where Blizzard said such similar to, "No more extreme stunlock or CC moments" - actually that somewhere began to work out in BC, lost track on WotlK and when Cata hit, all fail.
You (blizz) can't say something like stuns/CC adjusted ever since -- yeah, you got that done on rogues years before (plus almost each patch having a nerf for rogues ) Mages for instance suddenly had a 5sec stun, that struck like a truck in dmg around Cata.
Then of course, frost armor which procs even on paladin's ranged judgements.

Those are actually harmless examples, but I spoken too much already .

It's really best to move on.

 

-----signature-----

I suspect that while "dev team" seems like the thing to say, the problem is really the gap between the WoW team and players. There needs to be a team that is independent and equal to the dev team in terms of influence on decision-making. This team should be working hard to identify trends and likes/dislikes/what works/what doesn't work/etc. and boldly presenting that data for every new feature/redesign/etc. that the dev team or others want to do. Without that feedback mechanism, decisions tend to get fubar like 4.0/Cataclysm.

No, the CMs are not this team. I'm talking professional analysts, not glorified forum mods.

 

-----signature-----

I agree here. And the "problem" is not specific to 5 man dungeons. We used to call Bastion of Twilight "Bastion of Trash". The difficulty of 5 man is just fine (and in fine not harder than WotLK ones now that everybody is geared up). But there's too much trash slowing down progression and making the dungeons too long.



What I won't forgive Ghostcrawler is the complete dumbing down of talent trees. My guess on what happened, and I'm 99% sure that I'm right, is that they simplified the talent trees because they first planned to add the "Path of the Titans". But when they finally canceled the Path, they sadly kept the dumbed down talent trees, possibly so they don't lose the "work" already done.

I'm not an anti GC. I'm not forgetting that he was in charge for WotLK, what even most of the haters here consider the best WoW expansion. But the dumbing down of the classes, which not only strongly reduced player freedom and choice, but also often drastically changed the way the class plays, that I don't forgive. Let's take the Death Knight for instance... I was lucky that they choose the blood tree for tanking, and that the play style didn't change much. That's what kept me playing. But I perfectly understand the people who enjoyed e.g. frost tanking or even unholy tanking and got that option removed. I understand they are pissed. And rightfully so. And that's just the DK, same could be said for almost every class I guess (feral druid didn't change much apparently, well, still enjoyable).

In other words: Most silly move ever. If it's not broken, don't fix it.

When they ditched Path of Titans (which is sad because it was a feature many were waiting for), they should have reverted talents to WotLK.

 

-----signature-----

I chose the development team as the problem.

They forgot why people play WOW. They also lied about why they made their changes. Granted it is my view only, but the mechanics change behind health pools and healing were all done to fix Arena play. Even the recent changes to allow tanks to concentrate on stats other than threat related points to more allowing them to itemize tank armor more specifically for arena. Of course Arena play has also morphed into Rate BGs which I figure will be their next e-game.

The majority play the game to have fun. While they want a challenge they don't want a challenge akin to what is found in raids. Raiders are not a majority. They want a challenge and restricting that challenge to raids would have been more than sufficient. Yet the development team decided to make the game "challenging" but they could only find one role to do it with, healers.

The change to healers was simply the largest nerf ever to occur in WOW. From the time a player levels to 85 from 80 their cost to heal ratio worsened four fold. Then the developers decided to load their five man instances with gratuitous group damage. The lie was covered with the idea that tanks would no longer be clobbered by spiky are a succession of large hits but that never really held true.

When gear started to surmount their healing nerf they again laid into healers. Gear has always been the bane of the designers. I swear the people who create the gear rewards don't talk to the people who are behind the mechanics. They monty hall their game to death.

Oh well, they drove off a lot of good players, specifically those that healed. They took away their ability to feel heroic and who wants to play a npc

 

-----signature-----