WoW, Dungeons are hard? The title of your little treatise alone successfully has convinced me to never spend money on a Blizzard product ever again.
GC, way to miss the point. Sure, some people are whining about difficulty, but most of the people I hear are complaining about the FUN factor. Who the hell wants to pay 15/month to get kicked in the face in the LFD?
I'm a healer. As an adult with half a brain, I understand the changes made to healing in this expansion. I am ABLE to heal the content. But you know what, GC? It's not fun.
It's not fun getting yelled at by assholes who blame me for wipes, even though they stand in the fire, don't interrupt, and generally play like idiots. It's not fun not being able to save a tank that is biting it in AOE. It's not fun managing MANA. It's not fun being the class that is nerfed in order to tune the difficulty of an encounter. Seriously, was that your idea? When Wow tanks and you get fired, I really hope you get a job in customer service and can never get your arrogant hands on mmo development again.
It is literally BOGGLING how you've bungled this. You teach your player base to play a certain way. You give them the tools, and it works. People have fun. Complaints are minimal, usually about small scale class buffs/nerfs. You decide, that's not what I WANT anymore, I want to completely change things around! You change it so that your players, and especially the healers, are punished for learning to play a certain way. Then you basically write a post saying 'Gtfo bads' and expect that to be kosher. It's NOT.
I don't play mmos to get my ass kicked. Not saying I want shiny lewts handed to me on a silver platter, but there is a threshold in a game where the payoff fails to make the work worth it. You've just crossed it. I'm having a hard time seeing WoW coming back from that threshold.
As I said, I have no interest in flushing my money down the toilet so developers can talk down to the people with legitimate concerns about the state of things. Before that little post, I was content to just let my time run out and maybe come back in a few months, see how things are going. But now, GC? You and your company will never see another dime of my money again. Any company that allows its developers to alienate an unhappy portion of the player base in such a way (regardless of how big or small that portion is) doesn't deserve its success.
So long, and thanks for all the fish.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Hey Jillian,
ReplyDeleteThis post got me thinking so much, I posted a response on my own blog! You raise some excellent points, but I have to disagree. I hope I did so with due respect :\.
Peace!
Dan
Notwithstanding that it could be argued that we're not having fun because the game got harder and we suck at WoW, the fact remains that a lot of complaints are about the game being less engaging than before, thus, boring. And he did not only ignore this claim, he proceeded to explain why we need to ship up or ship out.We, the customer, need to ship up. That's not how you do business. I guess with over 10 Million customers you have the right to serve in whichever way you want, but if you keep it up long enough, that user base will certainly drop.
ReplyDeleteBah to first option. You know you're good, so forget that. It would be better to say that the PUG response to the new design philosophy sucked out the fun; that being inertia. Cataclysm design philosophy switched around the thresholds of responsibility and difficulty: healers are now responsible for mana, but tank/dps are responsible for avoidable damage.
ReplyDeleteIn a real sense, Wrath design philosophy said, "You know what? Healers wanna heal, deeps wanna deep, tanks wanna tank. Let's not ask more." Now dps has to self-heal, tanks have to self-heal. Heals have to dps sometimes! What the heckbutt!
But people are used to what they're used to, which means they don't have to care about self-healing or avoiding damage. Which means they still think that the tank and healer should be able to carry the load without them. Which means if a wipe occurs, the blame is angrily placed on tank/heals as is tradition.
Which results in a lot of pain, a lot of jerkassery, and a lot of explanation. Ain't imaginary life grand?
That being said, I have to ask...What does "engaging" mean to you? You say it is less engaging...but I am confused.
ReplyDeleteAs a tank, I am far more engaged in the process of play. I'm watching procs and cooldowns more. I'm keeping mobs out of fire, for myself and the deeps' survival. I'm applying self-heals to help out the healer. I hear it is similarly engaging for healing: you have to tactically apply your heals as opposed to fulfilling a rotation or twitch response.
At least, this was the design plan. If it was not achieved, this is a failure of the design in practice, not in theory.
Yeah, you are right, as a tank, it is WAY more engaging, and a warr tank, which as I understand, you have been playing one, it's WAYYYYYYY MORE ENGAGING than any other tanking class. Tankadins have their CD rotation, even today, and druids have the niftiest of all rotations...fewer buttons, and it's a matter of hoping for talent procs and tabbing. Warr tanks have to tab-cycle, now intelligently thanks to the ability queue, on top of the priority system, on top of having to relearn that victory rush is actually useful now.
ReplyDeleteBy 'engaging' I meant the questing and the lore. The pre-cataclysm events were as fun as could be; Jill and I had so much fun, we were really, REALLY looking forward to the changes coming to the world of Azeroth. I don't feel the new zones and the lore, and the questing storyline lived up to the buzz, not to mention The Shattering, which was a very very fun book. In all earnest, since Cata hit, I had WAY more fun leveling my rogue and our paladins levels 1 through 60 than with my DK or my warrior in the new zones. And that's all personal preferences, but that's the way it was with us. =/
A note from Blizzard to cellotlix:
ReplyDeletehttp://wow.joystiq.com/2011/01/17/spiritual-guidance-patch-4-0-6-for-discipline-and-holy-priests/#continued
"You were right about disc priests. We're sorry and we're gonna fix that right quick."
No chance of perhaps disabling the ability queue for prot warrs?
ReplyDeleteSince we're tweaking stuff as it is? hee hee.
now with Rift coming out, this is prolly gonna put even more pressure. SURE it's a wow clone. I won't try to make it otherwise. But heck, it's a REAL pretty wow clone, with a SUPER COOL class system.
ReplyDeleteSoo....dunno. =/
Of all the soon-to-be-released MMOs I hear about, Rift is only one who the bloggers think will survive and thrive past its start day. The beta is stable, they change things in response to player request incredibly fast (someone mentioned the need for an easier grouping mechanic and BAM, next patch there was one). I doubt I will ever play it, but I wish it the best of luck.
ReplyDelete