Philosophy on Shadowlands, Bliz & Acitivision

World of Warcraft
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Hi Ribbit. All very good points you bring up. Personally, I think Bliz moved away from the “fun” factor years ago when the “bean counters” got into the mix. I am being factious here and am just putting my own thoughts out based upon my personal gaming experiences, which notably have been mostly casual. Heck, I really did not raid on a regular basis until I joined Prissi’s raid group. I like her style and am hoping to continue with it into the SL.

Bliz has undergone so many changes in employees that I do not think there are many, if any, old timer developers left on their staff these days. And if they are, more than likely their ideas are run through a sieve to see if they will be able to attract the $$ that the current Bliz shareholders demand.

I much prefer a gaming company that actually listens to ALL their player base instead of only the loud minority. I also do not think money needs to be the driving force for gaming development. If you create a game that is truly fun and challenging, players will engage and stay engaged. But from what I’ve seen over the past decade, when management changes to a slot machine mentality, you only manage to keep those players that like slot machine play. Hence they lost a lot of players to other games because of those changes.

What’s interesting is that I am not playing as much as I was at the start of the BfA launch. I also noticed that I did this waning movement at the latter half of all Wow’s expacs that I participated in. I never even bought MoP or WoD xpacs, I just happen to obtain them when I came back for Legion, which I felt was an amazing xpac. I enjoyed it so much that I started to create alts to see the different aspects of the game from those different classes and specs.

I am hoping to see a similar layout in the upcoming SL xpac. I’ve my fingers crossed it doesn’t become the slugfest BfA has devolved into with grinding over and over and over ad nauseum.

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In my view, money, bean counters and shareholders are the low hanging fruit that are easiest for frustrated gamers to pick on. I try to give devs some benefit of the doubt due to how hard it is to please everyone in any endeavor - especially one as wide-ranging in population as WoW.

Frustration is an inherent aspect of any highly populated society. Nobody is going to get all their needs met. Government’s function is to attempt to balance the societal system so that no one pays more of the collective frustration cost than anyone else. Devs take on the same responsibility with their gaming populations. One primary difference is that gaming devs are allowed to disenfranchise subsets of their population without recrimination. We choose to play a game and can easily choose not to. We don’t choose to be born into our society. We can choose to leave, but it’s much more complicated than just cancelling a subscription.

Devs are people too. Some of them are greedy bastards, just like everywhere else in a highly populated society, but they’re an ill minority. The hardest part of being a member of a highly populated society is in bearing our societal frustration without polarizing into anger and finding a scapegoat other than the system to blame for it. A game can’t meet everyone’s needs. Devs need to focus their game for the population they want to reach. As a society evolves, a game’s audience and focus will also evolve. Some new people will join and some old people will leave. This is the nature of progression, the nature of time, the nature of change.

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A little off topic for where it was, yeah :wink: However, it’s not an inappropriate conversation by any means. I’ve moved it off into it’s own topic so you are all welcome to continue.

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Aha…sorry about that. I seemed to have segued a bit. It seems Ribbit and I tend to do this from time to time. At least I know I do because the original topic seems to lend itself for a side rail sometimes.