World of Warcraft: Current Year
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Araxen
Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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Asmongold watched a video response from a guy yesterday that thought bringing up psychology and it's ramifications in game design was cynical so I'd put whoever that was down for getting sweet sweet sponsoring.
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Yes, now, but that wasn't the case when the expansion launched. Now that you have what basically are "gear welfare" programs for the casuals it has become largely irrelevant. However it was in the first weeks that the casuals determined that the expansion didn't feel right, and wandered off. Hence the sudden "subscribe for 6 months and get this ship" program. And I guess also the reason why warfronts dispense that much gear at that ilevel. If you go back to the articles (or even the posts in this thread) when they were introduced, almost all semi-hardcore to hardcore players were all surprised how much loot was going to come out of warfronts.
Please note that I didn't say scaling is the sole issue, it is just one of many issues: classes being redesigned again, the GCD changes and loss of artifact skills for their rotation and Legion legendary utilities just felt like a reduction in power and possibilites for the players (just like the skill pruning). And people felt that they were missing something, something they already had, and it just didn't feel right.
At the end of the day the casual end of the playerbase plays for fun, and if the game isn't fun at maxlevel anymore they think the game isn't worth playing.
EDIT: At the end let me rephrase that above a bit after I thought about it:
The reason we get catchup gear that quickly (like warfronts and shit) is because the internal metrics in Blizzard showed that they are losing the casual end of the playerbase. Those players are more the profitable end however - they don't generate as much traffic and server costs, and they are the ones buying gold via WoW tokens.
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TV spots won't work for WoW anymore. That is not how games marketing seems to work in 2018. They need that street cred thing: That someone the kids respect is enjoying the game.
In their mind Ninja having so many people watch him play Fortnite made that game a success, so they want some of that action too. Asmongold however is out, he doesn't even have a wife like Ninja and is basically poopsocking it in his mancave. We should ask him if he has a duffel bag.
It's not the first time they tried this, on the HoTS page of the blizzard launcher I see "xy is now streaming" marketing pop up from time to time.
Vimeseh
Trakanon Raider
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Oh I'm not disputing the game as a whole is fucked right now. Just that the scaling is the least of it, considering we had a similar variant of it in Argus and Suramar. The difference was regular world mobs were still roll overs. People weren't unsubscribing in droves because they went from two shotting WQ mobs to dying if they pulled 3 or 4. Speaking of casuals here, raiders never had the problem transitioning unless they boosted a new toon and went through Argus.
The other things you mentioned are actual issues worth dealing with. Dumbing down of classes, GCD slowing everything down, stupid time gating, and a nerfed mission table that shouldn't even be in the game if this is what they want it to be now. Not to mention a historic high in plain broken specs.
Grim1
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I'd be curious to see the average age of current WoW subscibers. It can't be a low number. And that's not a knock on WoW. But a lot of kids (and even those in their 20's) don't even have PC's and it doesn't bother them. They do everything on mobile.
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a c i d.f l y
ಠ_ಠ
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He says in the stream leading up to this clip that "Blizzard doesn't pay attention to streams, clearly."
Fucker
Log Wizard
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Ion has been shitting on it for months in front of millions and they pay him for it.
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Arbitrary
Tranny Chaser
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I was watching some today and he spent a substantial part of his stream speaking intelligently about his problems with the game, watching videos of people speaking intelligently about their problems with the game, and having further discussions about them, all in front of his huge audience. His YouTube channel has 300k subscribers, his last video on the problems with BFA reached 500k views, and he's got a presence on Twitter. Between what he's saying and the signal boosting he's providing it is going to be pretty hard to ignore him.
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Thing is all of the wow streamers and you tubers have ben flat out shitting on BFA since beta because it sucks. Even people who are typical apologist hate the current game. asmondgold shits on it, bellular shits on it, preach shits on it, taliesen and eviltel shit on it, hazel games shits on it, panzer from tradechat shits on it. I mean at some point you would think the faggots at Blizzard would get the message.
xzi
Mouthbreather
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The biggest thing to me is taliesin and evitel shitting on BFA. When even they are like "yikes" you know you did something wrong lmao. Their videos are always about the more fun aspects of the game and speculation it's surprising to see them be negative about it in any light.
To keep adding to the shitshow of BFA, if you guys have greens with sockets on them you should put them on the AH for more gold than they're worth because PvP scaling with sockets and enchants is broken at the moment. To the point where there is a 3200 rated shadow priest wearing white/gray gear aside from his azerite and he's basically unkillable lmfao.
I'm watching Swifty in all greens at 300 with all sockets and he's like 4v1ing and not taking any damage at all. Just slowly destroying people.
To keep adding to the shitshow of BFA, if you guys have greens with sockets on them you should put them on the AH for more gold than they're worth because PvP scaling with sockets and enchants is broken at the moment. To the point where there is a 3200 rated shadow priest wearing white/gray gear aside from his azerite and he's basically unkillable lmfao.
I'm watching Swifty in all greens at 300 with all sockets and he's like 4v1ing and not taking any damage at all. Just slowly destroying people.
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And that is the reason they need that fresh blood infusion for the aging WoW playerbase. TV spots don't work, the kids these days don't watch TV. The remaining "plays games on a PC on a console" gamers in their twenties seem to hang out on Twitch. The mobile-only players are basically lost until you bring WoW to that platform.
Not to be apologetic for Ion, but I think his job is mainly to be a lightning rod for player hate. Just like Ghostcrawler was, and he burned out from that. So you get a lawyer-type person to do that job.
My guess what happened:
2008: WoTLK - Subscription all-time high, Blizzard-Activision merger happens, but they don't touch the goose that is laying golden eggs
2010: Cataclysm - They want to bring challenge back to the game after conditioning the playerbase for years that everything gets easier with time. It backfires, subscriptions plummet. Raised eyebrows at Activision.
2012: Pandaria - Basically giving players some meme-worthy things they always wanted. Everyone loves pandas, right? But subscriptions don't recover, and fall off shortly after launch.
This is the point where Activision steps in and exercises more control over Blizzard, telling them to bring in external "consultants". They want more "daily interactions" with the game, because once you don't log in for a few days others in your social circle think you have stopped playing and may follow suit. So you need to do your dailiy quests! And that is the reason why you don't get weekly quests, their success metric is "daily interactions".
So they bring in mobile games experts because mobile games work the same way: play everyday so you feel attached, so it becomes routine, like brushing your teeth. And because some people can't login due to travel they develop a mobile app, but what should players do with it that counts as "daily interaction"? Clearly just guildchat and messaging isn't enough to make them feel attached to the game. So they develop a mission table where you get gold and raid loot.
2014: WoD - They fucked up, they know it, and they abort the expansion early.
2016: Legion - They bring their A-game and give players more that they always wanted. Demon hunters and lore that matters, and isn't sidequest material. Stuff that players were always interested in, like Argus and Sargeras and Titan stuff, they even bring back Illidan.
2018: They have no idea where to go with the lore now that Metzen already left the building. So we need more war in warcraft, so they bring up "powerful women", because its $CURRENT_YEAR. And now we have an expansion that could be titled as "Do banshee queens get PMS?"
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Tarisk
Pathetic Reaction Bot
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100% this. I was kind of oblivious to the young people only on mobile thing until more recently when I started, out of boredom dabbling with pubg mobile. the amount of little high pitched voice kiddos on there, randomly getting in an argument with their parents on an open mic mid game is absurd. (that and indians playing with cars honking at them mid traffic but thats another issue)
But look at pubg pc or other games just on PC and it's definitely an older demographic in comparison. youngest maybe being 20'ish. but more older than younger for sure.
At least with PC gaming, or even console gaming you have to be in a somewhat dedicated area for it. which I think the younger age just can't do. Be it the ADHD, or whatever it is keeping them from sitting still long enough to enjoy a game on a pc/console. They have to have that option to either shut it off at a moments notice or move around for whatever reason. and MMO's just cant offer that capability, no matter how much they water down dungeons/raids into shorter and more pointless experiences.
And on top of that, I feel those failed attempts to do that to the content just promotes shit behavior on top of it, on multiple levels. From refusing to communicate, or to not give a damn about it, to even rejecting the idea of it flat out. I've been kicked from LFG shit in the past for simply trying to have a conversation during a boring, repetative dungeon i was just doing for my daily. Even if I was doing more than 50% of the groups total damage.