Blizzard asking classes for opinionsFollow

I don't see it having a major impact on the game.

My guess is that they're going to see what the players would like improved, compare it to their internal wish-list for the next expansion, and go from there. I wouldn't be surprised if a couple of the more popular player-ideas make it through, but I'm not seeing this as a major turning point for the game or anything.

If I was feeling cynical I would say it gives them the chance to give players the credit for things they were going to do anyway, and bolsters claims that the listen to their user base more than other games.

Leading and fallacious question. You're presuming that things were ZOMG OSSIM back in the day. But the game had detractors and problems then too.

Why don't you tell us what the "right direction" is?

The sad thing is that it kind of matches up to the post on the rate of change in WoW that was up earlier. Blizz released completely unbalanced content. However even though the rate of change has been under control since January there are certain classes/spec which have obviously been broken for awhile which have seen no change.


Case in point, Ret Paladins. They have been parsing low the entire expansion. There have been a number of fairly well written and thought out posts talking about the proc/rng nature of Ret paladin dps as well as clunky and cumbersome dps rotations. There were some changes to inquisition and mastery 6+ months ago to help but it was still non competitive. It has taken until well into the life cycle for it to be addressed with a censure hot fix just this week.

I think wotlk and cata is really making it abundantly clear that the claim that blizzard knows and all sees all and has some grand plan that only they can make out is just bunk. With aggregate parse info, and a number of sites which scrub through tens of thousands of guilds parses from top end to bottom barrel it is very easy to trend in real time the performance of class/specs so when it takes 2-3 tiers of content to address issues that are obvious after 4-6 weeks of live content it really takes away from any sense of blizzard is somehow on top of the game when it comes to class balance.

Being snarky won't progress this conversation.

You implied a qualitative basis for your question: That the game was "better" when you played. How was it better? If you want to expound on what Blizzard should do to win back your $15 a month, here's your chance to speak up.

As to why they're asking on their forums, it's obviously because they feel that they can get a large amount of reasonable data from posting there. Where exactly do ex-players hang out? Presumably not in large numbers on sites that are dedicated to the game they stopped playing. N'est pas?

Right, because they wouldn't have the emails of the people who are subbed and used to be. Blizzard would never send out invites to comeback and try the game again. I get more emails from blizzard since I quit then when I was playing. Why do I feel like I am back on the o-boards. Zam is pretty much the last link to my wowing days but if this is the kind of response I get to a simple question I'm done here too.

These are why I quit:

random world PVP on Illidan, everything but major cities is pretty much dead.

Giving my favorite class (Paladin) rogue points. Awful idea IMO of course.

"streamlined' and boring talent trees which is just adding to the homogenization to make it easier to balance (which they still have yet to do).

Healing changes, some like it. I do not. When I felt more powerful at level 80 than I do at 85 there is something not quite right there. Every healer had their niches, if you preferred hots you rolled a druid. Prefer large single target heals go for a pally

Shared lockouts, basically taking a baseball bat to the pug raiding community.

Guild levels and rep, nice in theory poor in practice. Stay in a large guild that's just a different version of trade chat so you don't lose your perks, almost no new guilds recruiting successfully that I saw.

Everything is way too linear now. It feels like a single player game I have to fork out a monthly fee for.

LFD is a very nice idea, it should have been implemented realm only at first to see how that went. The way the system is now no one cares how they treat anyone else because chances are they will never see them again, couple that with the increased difficulty curve of cata heroics compared to even wrath when it was first out leads to a very bad time. (for me at least)

that's all I can think of off the top of my head, but you bet there's more.
Now please stop with your attitude, if you don't like what I'm asking then just ignore it.
And you started with the snark :P

Where do you find their numbers?

Blizzard shareholders meetings. By their last accounting subscriptions were down 900k. with a little help from google you can find recordings of their meetings.

You're reading that into it. You might want to try some lotion for that thin skin.

Emailing a past customer can be a viable strategy and might be worth the labor-hours for them to try. But I doubt they'd get a lot of real responses this way. (And by "a lot" I mean a viable sample pool) The many emails that are not from Blizzard that try to look like this kind of thing would veer many people from responding. Too many fakes to know the real McCoy. Add to this the problem of response rate (often >4% total mailing) and you get a very small sample pool from however many labor hours they'd have to pay for to get through the entire developing, mailing, reading, filtering, analysis cycle.

The rest of your response seems to lead me to believe you feel WoW was more entertaining for you in TBC. Seems you are not alone. Rest assured that particular segment of players will be well represented on the o-boards from what I've seen thus far.

I am not thin skinned, I just always held zam in a higher esteem than I do the o-boards.

I had more fun in vanilla, I had more fun in BC, I had more fun in wrath. Cata made me quit. I do not have a preferred expansion I have liked every one up to this point and was always able to find things to do until cata launched.

But the "OMG people stopped playing and so did I so WoW must be dying!!" response is so much more drama filled and exciting. People like to feel edgy by joining the vocal minority that feel it's their duty in life for everyone to know what they say is fact.

Getting back to the original topic I think it's a great idea for Blizz to ask the player base what changes they would like to see. Who would be better to ask then the people playing the class, spending hours theorycrafting, and even more time disscussing it with their fellow player? The player base obsesses with knowing there class to the best of their abilities, why wouldn't they tap that resource?

I get Cata wasn't perfect in any way and a lot of people where dissapointed with some aspect of it. At the same time class balance was as close to balanced as we have ever seen it. Yes some classes have fallen behind and Blizz hasn't done much to help pick them up, but unfortunatly it is the way things have always been. Without totally homogenizing the way every class plays there is always be some dissparency there.

Leveling still sucks the second or third time around. Healing sucks unless you like the new whack-a-mole homogenization. Nothing to do once you hit ilvl 363, unless you can magically gain an extra 2 ilvl points and a fake achievement so you can join PUG raids.

Yeah, game's dead. Waiting for the next expansion.

Edit: I could increase my Druid's ilvl beyond 363 if I saved up enough VP to get T12, but seriously... Valor Point grinding is more boring than leveling up, plus there's a weekly cap. FTL.

Edited, Sep 13th 2011 12:47am by Mazra

One thing that our armchair quarterback analysis can't take into consideration is where the 900k lost subs were located. Around the time frame considered in the number of lost subs, Rhode was telling us all about the problems WoW-China was having with licensing the game, etc.

One thing I would like to see to go along with the LFR and LFD is expanding the friends-list to work cross-realm. That way those people you meet in a pug you actually like, you can group with again, without having to share your real name and e-mail address.

That comes back to the problems that I had with playing. Leveling became a linear grind, with little to no variation. You go A->B->C every time following the quest guide (maybe doing A2 before A1, but the quest hubs are all the same going from one to the other). I tried to level my 80 DK after finishing my mage to 85, but I got bored within about 30 minutes of doing the same quests all over again, made me not want to even come close to my two other level 80 characters.

Needing to buy gear with points is dumb, there I said it. It was better in TBC when you would just get the 2-3 tier token drops per boss and they would get handed out and turned in for their respective pieces (better than in vanilla where you got individualized pieces, though). I hated doing daily quests, I only did them when absolutely required (for reputation for pieces of gear/enchantments that I had to get). I never had trouble with money, so I never ran them for those purposes.

Playing a mage became really boring, if you play arcane you are a 2-button hero, fire was so RNG-based/inconsistent that you could be the most skilled player and still end up middle of the pack if you weren't getting consistent crits because of the reliance on them. Frost is still the red-headed step child of PvE raiding (well maybe it is a strawberry blonde as they tried to make a couple changes.... but it was still generally the weakest spec). The spell abilities didn't transfer over to the other classes, so you only used a few abilities depending on what spec you were.

One of the worst parts for me was feeling so much weaker at 85 than I did at 80, it was such a turnoff.

Edited, Sep 12th 2011 9:17pm by Anobix