World of Warcraft: Current Year

jayrebb said:

The pace of development hasn't changed-- so they have to cut jobs and pay to fit the new balance sheets handed down by Activision. "When it's ready" isn't acceptable anymore per Activision, but the response by Blizzard has been to cut jobs and cut pay on rehires. The response by Blizzard to the new balance sheets was supposed to be an improved dev cycle.

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To add to this, I think they have the glacial and inefficient Blizzard "When it's ready" philosophy with money hungry Activision stepping in to launch products before the end of that cycle.

Worst of both worlds.

There's also a lack of direction with Blizzard's management from top to bottom. They don't know what product they should be developing to release "When it's ready".

Rajaah said:

So what's the verdict on Shadowlands? I've liked every expansion of WoW noticeably less than the one before it, with the exception of Legion which I LOVED. Other than Legion, I can't say I've enjoyed the game since Cataclysm, maybe Mists. BFA was a total chore and the only reason I "finished" it (aka got to max level on both factions and did most of the raids) was because of sunk cost. I'd spent $40 on it and subscribed for a couple months, so it would have been a waste to stop playing.

Had zero intention at all of playing WoW ever again after BFA, but I had someone tell me the other day that Shadowlands is really interesting lorewise and might be on par with Legion in terms of being a big step up from the expac before it. Not sure if this means Shadowlands is actually GOOD or if it just seems decent compared to how dismal BFA was.

Can't lie, after I heard that I got a serious itch to give WoW onnnne more spin. Just asking here before I sink another $40 (and more importantly, another hundred hours) into WoW.

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Lets just say this - Going by days from launch to each major patch, Legion will have put out two major patches before SL's will put out its first major patch. Alluding further to the fact that we may only have one more major patch before the next expansion is teased. Meaning an even longer content drought than this initial phase. Nevermind the fact that a huge chunk of players have already left the game and will likely not come back for the rest of the expansion. If you're only interested in the lore, you would be better served by waiting until at least 9.2 is out and the expansion cost is down to 20 bucks at that point. But I get being bored, do you.

I have not played this game since burning crusade, nor do I plan to play, however my daughter has found the Vulpera on the character creation screen and is begging me to unlock them. Do I have to buy Shadowlands to do this? Every guide I try to follow it seems my shit is way different or I'm missing some precursor shit.

For example, I cannot find Princess Talanji at all, its like she doesn't exist for me.

GC took over lead after Tigole launched WOTLK if I remember correctly.

Was either Mid-WOTLK or end of WOTLK he came on but not sure if he was immediately lead or if he became lead for Cata development only. The change was pretty controversial at the time, given WOTLK's success I recall.

A lot of people simply weren't happy about a design leadership change during/immediately after a great expac. It had nothing to do with GC's performance, but rather the timing of his entry onto the team. People rejected it out of pocket for that reason. There are still people who hold some grudge or bias to this day over that. Including a few Blizzard staff. "Fuck this guy" sentiments abound. It didn't help the guy upstairs that Greg reported to made him take all the heat for decisions he didn't make, as mentioned earlier here.

He had to facetank some of the biggest blowback in WoW history, while WoW was at it's peak, before the "WoW is dying" meme started in Cata. After GC's watch, WoW dies every single year since 2010.

I had a ton of respect for Ghostcrawler. Straight shooter and really clever guy. If he was rehired (lol) I might even consider playing WoW again =P

Neranja said:

Sad thing here is that a lot of warlock players think the class regressed from MoP onwards. Some even think they fucked up the class intentionally to destroy "his legacy" or whatever.

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Yeah but MOP Warlock, at least for PvP, is honestly peak Warlock. I loved MOP's PVP and Warlocks getting the non-WoD-and-later-version of Kij'Jaeden's Cunning is what defined the class and subsequently killed the class when they took that away in WOD and gutted the class.

He was right, though. One of the biggest complaints people had was they refused to balance PVP and PVE separately for the longest time because they didn't want to create "player confusion" about different skills/skills doing different things/etc. Which was fucking stupid, because all it did was breed resentment and MMOs were moving towards a more PVE-centric playerbase for years by that point (was that around the time they still had the dumb "WoW PVP ESports idea"?), so people hated that their class was being nerfed because of an increasingly niche playerbase.

edit: I forgot about KJ's Cunning. Man, that skill felt so good. Ignoring PVP, with raids becoming increasingly more and more DDR happy, it felt very good to be able to still cast while moving to avoid mechanics.

PvP in SL isn’t popular. It is just played for rewards since it has a better reward system than raiding and M+. PvP will be dead moving forward with M+ and raid loot optimizations.

Yea, Foggy beat me to it. I hate pvp and I ended up pvp'ing to fill slots. Those that like PVP in WoW are eating this shit up because they have lots of prey that are just trying to get in and get out of it as quick as possible just so they can go on to do something that they actually enjoy. I feel like you missed our conversation about this Mist , but you were actively involved in it. How you formed this opinion mere weeks later is beyond me.

I hate to pile on, but yea I slogged through a week or two of BGs to fill slots that the covenant didn't cover. The second I finished upgrading my last piece I never set foot in there again.

BoozeCube said:

Even though Classic brings in the subs Blizzard is too stupid, greedy, and arrogant to forgo this quarters earning for long term renewing sub revenue. I also feel Ion and the other retail Devs feel slighted more people want to play a 15 year old version of the original game instead of the dogshit systematic failure that is retail. That has a sting when you are trying to justify your job in a board meeting. We can re-release old content and make more money then spending all this time, assets, and money on this dogshit you failures made.

Once Classic was outperforming Systemlands I am sure a couple of people asked Ion.

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Crossover from the Classic thread, but this makes me wonder if this is the reason they're dragging their feet on fixing old content scaling. Like they were told by the higher ups that they either increase participation in SL or their budget for new content gets cut by 20%.

The only reason it hasn't been fixed by now is either A) They don't know how to fix it, or B) They don't want to. I'm ruling out (A) because there is already an 8x multiplier in Legion raids now (You deal 8x more damage and take 1/8 damage). All they would have to do is increase that to 20x or so and the problem would be fixed. Now I know they're a small indie company and super busy all the time but you'd think it would take an intern like 10 minutes to make this change. If there was some kind of bug that benefited players like bosses were dropping too much gold, you know they'd have that shit hotfixed before lunch.

BFA scaling is a different issue that they completely screwed the pooch on. I'll save my rant on that for another day but the TL;DR is that mobs there continue to scale with players item levels, making them even stronger than SL mobs in some cases.

It's a big smug "fuck you" from them not to have at least Legion fixed by now. Anyways, I don't think anyone here besides me gives a shit about old content so I've said my piece.

you did say havoc DH was fine in PvP early S1, so I don't know how much credibility you have at this point. They had no representation at the time you made that statement besides 2 players.

Considering only NINETY FIVE US DH's have hit 2k rating in 2's, I'm not sure where you're coming from. Guess you're just a god at the class comparatively, but the numbers dont lie: