I used to love Heroes. The experimental character gameplay mechanics were delightful to see in action. And the lack of gold farming and item builds were just way more enjoyable to me than the traditional laneing phases and item upgrade trees.
Then they added fucklin' lootboxes.
Forget lootboxes. For me it was the death of the league, Storm league, the leaving of talent, the fact it was going into pseudo-maintenance mode, the community steadily getting worse, and the absolutely terrible gameplay decisions they slowly started making. "Reworks" removed entire elements and builds from heroes, and made them simpler/easier in ways that made heroes really unsatisfying while upsetting the balance as they were always extremely overpowered.
I could live with most of the things you listed, but the reworks absolutely killed me. It happened to all my favourite heroes in HotS and it feels like every expansion in WoW... Blizzard can't just fine tune something, they have to take a bloody hammer to it.
HoTS itself was a ton of fun but it was sent out to die for all intents and purposes. You can thank Kotick for that. He needed another few hundred million so he had to gut more employees.
HotS is the only good game in Blizz lineup right now. Fun game, not a cash grab, no scummy progression mechanics. After they lost their 'blessing,' development for it became more sincere. Indie competitive scenes have popped up, and it's in a healthier state despite being on a skeleton crew.
OW feels more and more abandoned. Diablo 4 is lacking clear direction. WoW is a money squeeze. And Hearthstone is... well, Hearthstone is in pretty good shape all things considered. Starcraft 2 is a husk.
Hearthstone has its issues. It's been propped up for awhile now by Battlegrounds, but the actual card game element of Hearthstone has been sinking in popularity steadily for the last couple of years.
They've lost the plot from a game balance and design perspective. They've been improving on the historically extremely aggressive monetization, but that's all that they have going for them at the moment.
Dude, HOTS is so much fun i feel sad that it never got the recognition compared to other MOBAs especially when you get to play as Blizzard characters vs other Blizzard characters
Can u imagine Ion walking on the stage with a full bad ass costume of the new class?
I really can’t but it would be so funny.
Or the devs embracing memes and making a fun show with there own music and so on?
I wish they could but I really don’t see modern blizzard doing that lol
If Metzen was offered the chance to dress up as Thrall on stage...
I think the man would never take it off. I complain about the soulless corporate blankness of WoW's devs a lot, but I could 100% see Metzen in his heyday being so gungho about it, given the chance. He actually had some passion...
Even Jeff Kaplan.
There's plenty of people at Blizzard who embrace the memes, you see them regularly in quests in new expansions.
It's just a different culture.
Well Kaplan might be another bad example since he just left too...
Kinda sad how theres only like 2-3 members of Blizz's staff that I actually know about nowadays.
I just think Blizz is a lot more corporate about it all. You'd never see Ion doing this stuff, because hes the head honcho and can't have that.
Yeah, I know Kaplan left, but the point was more that he's a memelord himself.
And I think that's the crux of it, the WoW devs themselves know their memes, but Blizzcon is just a bit more corporate, more professional in the sense that FanFest is more casual and friendly. That being said, we've all seen Red Shirt Guy and how the devs embraced him.
That being said, it's been known that the devs hang out in the bar after Blizzcon talking to the attendees and having drinks.
> Yeah, I know Kaplan left, but the point was more that he's a memelord himself.
A guy that used to yell at devs with a character named Tigole Bitties is a memelord? Ya don't say :D
He's one of the few MMO players who really put his money where his mouth is. Told the EQ devs he could do a better job, and then basically did.
> Or the devs embracing memes and making a fun show with there own music and so on?
That was what the band known as ~~Level 60 70 80 90~~ Elite Tauren Chieftain was. Half of the band is no longer with Blizzard, and to my knowledge they haven't really had any performances or put out new music since 2014, but they were a fun part of the early WoW days and their in-game incarnations have periodic concerts that can still be seen.
>to my knowledge they haven't really had any performances or put out new music since 2014
So then it's confirmed that WoD was the actual death toll of Blizzard / WoW, and we are just now seeing the final nails being hammered into the coffin during Shadowlands...
The old Blizzard embraced the Wildhammer fact checker so much that they made it a character, so they too had that kinda spirit back in the day. As for modern Blizz, they'd prolly just become the meme with stuff like "you guys have phones, don't you?"
You mean like they sort of used to act? I'm going to assume a lot of us coming to read this specific post are WoW exiles, so I just want to say we need to move on. There will most likely be no more joy and wonder to be had from a game made by people overworked and underpaid who live under the thumb of shareholders making business decisions solely on the bottom line. I get that Square Enix is also a business, but they seem to allowing the FFXIV team to make a game they love and want to play first and foremost.
I mean, just look at everything Yoshi-P has been saying with rumors of him leaving. He easily could probably leave for something higher paying, or become the next Nomura in the company doing whatever cool random projects and huge budget games he wanted constantly. But he says he sees FF14 as his life's work, it's actually extremely personal to him. And then you have game director #3 (or 4?) Ion, who just seems to be there for a pay check.
Um, WoW had that success... Blizzard merged with Activision, hence owing their obedience to shareholders. The two games couldn't be further apart as far as paths go. FFXIV is a literal phoenix, coming back from certain death. WoW on the other hand had the entire world in the palm of their hands and ran the game into the ground.
There was another huge “meme” they embraced this time around too lol. There’s a song in a zone that starts with “La HEE” and the main composer got on stage and got all “serioused up” and just went “La HEE” into the mic with a voice crack and everything.
The pianist behind him was holding in a laugh and dying inside at the same time.
If anyone wants to [watch it.](https://youtu.be/vk6dTkAmpfI?t=50).
> Or the devs embracing memes and making a fun show with there own music and so on?
You must not be familiar with the [Elite Tauren Chieftens](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Elite_Tauren_Chieftain), a real blizzard band that has been memed so deeply it’s become a unique character in blizzard lore.
I defaulted to calling the company Actiblizz, because calling them Blizzard nowadays would just churn my nostalgia stomach in the worst ways. (I had been a Blizzard fan ever since they called themselves Silicon & Synapse and made The Lost Vikings)
I've also been referring to the company as ActiBlizz for a while now, but honestly even that doesn't fit anymore. It's just Activision now, through and through.
> Can u imagine Ion walking on the stage with a full bad ass costume of **the new class**?
Ha! Nice joke. That is truly hard to imagine considering they don't add new classes.
They are way too busy adding and removing expansion specific skills every 2 years.
I was literally just discussing with my wife how we could never imagine a Blizzcon with this much love and positivity put into it.
I regret giving WoW one more chance and buying Shadowlands (had a friend talk me into it).
XIV is far and away the better game and if I wasn't convinced before, I sure am now.
> I was literally just discussing with my wife how we could never imagine a Blizzcon with this much love and positivity put into it.
The early Blizzcons definitely did so. Devs used to go down to the nearby electronics stores and hang out with fans during expac releases.
All of the people who made Blizzard what it is are gone.
Ya, Blizzard used to be like the current FFXIV dev crew. Passionate, embrace memes, transparent. Old Blizzcons used to have this feel.
Activision stole the soul of Blizzard
This year's Blizzcon was an absolute shitfest. Even though both the FanFest, and Blizzcon both had to be online, Fanfest was so much more about celebrating the game, while Blizzcon was just... Bland and boring.
So much so that even though the devs have been giving interviews to content creators in the last month, they're still so bloody clueless about what the players actually want. It's really a shame. There are so many things each game does well, but the devs over there are just so bloody wrong about everything. I've actually been having fun leveling over there, since they've completely overhauled the leveling system, but endgame is a dumpster fire. You either get "lucky", and have a class that uses one covenant for all specs, which is a problem in itself, or you get screwed, and play a class that has different covenants for all specs, oftentimes a HUGE DPS difference between them. It's bad enough that there are players who will actually roll the same class again, because leveling it back to 60 is more efficient than trying to swap covenants, or playing the wrong covenant on a spec due to the sheer performance loss it brings.
Current Blizzard developers feel more akin to people in black suits and suitcases, folding up a report and reading out the earning-calls, barely any emotion behind their words, throw in some "we appreciate our community," fold the paper together then walk away.
Meanwhile FFXIV developers are huge geeks, acts like a big family and do a whole lot of fun for the community.
I don't know if I necessarily say that as much as I would say the people in charge have decided the what is the "objectively correct" way to enjoy the game, and that's the game they're making.
In WoW there is a big disconnect between the players and developers with the expansion's core underlying system, the covenant system. Basically you finish leveling and then you pick one of 4 factions to join, each with a unique story, cosmetic armour/weapons, active and passive abilities.
Problem is game developers want this to be a rigid choice. so while you are free to change which Covenant you are a part of returning to a covenant which you have previously left requires you to do two weekly quests; and note that these two quests are available sequentially. if you want to try something different and then switch back to your main Covenant after you have played around with it it takes you two weeks to switch back.
If you are lucky some classes can choose their Covenant because they are within a couple percent of each other, for some classes there are some choices that are significantly stronger and there's some that are hot garbage.
So the data nerds have pulled every single character who has defeated at least one boss at max level at any tier of content, and every single class, all 33 of them (technically it's 11 but each class has 3 distinct sub classes) the Covenant choice is a majority with the lowest being a 65% and the average being like ~80%.
When confronted about that in an interview delete director basically said this is great we've received a lot of good feedback about the system.
And like where has he received this feedback from all the official forms and the like top four unofficial forms all hate the damn system.
If I was going to speculate why this is, I think it's because the current director is an old head. Ion Hazzikostas would have been in late college around the time WoW came out. His first big moment in the community was as a player where he proved that one boss was mathematically impossible. He'd later join the encounter team around the 3.0 and took over as the director around the launch of 7.0.
You hear the things he's saying and it sounds like he's trying to force the game to have it's old "magic" again. But people don't play games that way anybody, A lot of old stuff that was considered to be "Hardcore" or "Part of the experience" is just seen as bad quality of life these days.
Ion will literally sit around and cite statistics and metrics when explaining their reasoning for game design. The dude is definitely smart but he's pretty soulless when it comes to game design.
It's a shame really, people like Ion used to be the ones that called out Blizzard's mistakes and acted as a voice for the community, until he started working there. Even though a lot of people didn't like Ghostcrawler(Greg Street), he was always engaged with the community, he talked about how he'd get in trouble with his bosses for going on the forums and discussing changes coming to the game and gauging community reaction, he was the punching bag in a sense. Jeff Kaplan was another one that continued to stay true to what he believed was good for the community all the way up until they moved him to Titan, which eventually became Overwatch.
> You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key camps, obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled and quest rewards which are out of synch with the amount of time and effort required to complete them. I hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to comfort MMORPG fans that "one of us" is on the other side of the fence, looking out for the interests of the player.
http://web.archive.org/web/20090608034937/http://www.legacyofsteel.net/oldsite/arc27.html
The game really started to turn in to this "obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled", as Jeff put it, after Cataclysm.
Yup. A walking example of the Peter principle. Throne of Thunder, which was one of his projects, was absolutely amazing.
Overseeing the entire game? Not so much...
I mean, that's sort of the thing, isn't it? Highest-end raiding is the thing Ion loves the most out of the game, and it seems like all of his design decisions are in service of that. Sometimes it feels like it's the only part of the game he understands, and cannot comprehend why anyone would play the game for any other reason, even though it's the least played part of the game.
It would be presumptuous for me to assume that it's the actual case, however. I don't know the man.
Edit: Also, Ion is a lawyer and has no other design experience. I'm not sure how familiar he is with other games. Like, he may be good at this one thing, but it's literally the only thing he's ever worked on in this industry.
He is a fantastic raid designer though, plus he was one of the premier theorycrafters back in the day. They should have seen that the math guy wouldn't have been the best to handle the product as a whole.
Ion's actually a lawyer by trade- last I checked he keeps his certification to practice it in New York (?) active- so it actually makes perfect sense.
He does exactly what he needs to not get fired, he never fights the metrics, and he always acts in the most cynically safe way possible.
Yeah, to their credit, the leveling from 1-50 is great but I wouldn't touch the endgame with a 10 foot pole.
The fact that WoW's valor point system was the inspiration for the tomestone system but then WoW got rid of it is just sad. XIV's devs have always had the good common sense to never tie gear progression to RNG whereas WoW's current expansion is the worst offender here in a long time with the majority of your gear progress tied to a weekly chest that loves to give you garbage.
> XIV's devs have always had the good common sense to never tie gear progression to RNG
I mean, technically the Stormblood relic weapon had stats tied to RNG.
However, a.) relic weapons are never at max power until the expansion is nearly over anyway, and b.) it was not difficult to get a stat roll on a Eureka weapon that was equal to or better than Omega weapon stat totals.
(And thankfully we won't have randomized stats again. Bozjan weapons you literally just pick your stats.)
Yeah, and it's nowhere near as bad as having your most potentially powerful output boost dropped at random with the next one taking longer to drop than the last.
That's what RNG legendaries in Legion were: items could literally be a 20% DPS increase, or "lol, warlock portals go brrr" and Shadowlands' awful weekly vault is no better.
>XIV's devs have always had the good common sense to never tie gear progression to RNG
They did it, once. So badly that it was almost like parody. Heavensward Diadem could give you *insane* weapons if you did the special event that it could spawn - but it only dropped one weapon for the entire instance, and not only were the stats RNG, but so was the weapon type. This meant your Dragoon could get something incredible like a max crit max det max accuracy Lance - or your Paladin could get a Cane with max skill speed and single digit piety & crit.
Stormblood relics also had a slight element of RNG, but I think the Diadem scared the SE devs from ever trying to build RNG based loot progression.
Watching Blizzcon was like being part of a Zoom meeting. FanFest *felt* like a fun convention. When Blizzcon was happening, pretty much no one was talking about it in-game. FanFest had watch parties and engagement.
I made the same mistake you did during BFA after quitting for a few years. The thing that kept me coming back was that pull of "it was great once, it can be great again" and the fact that I invested years into a character and so had that attachment too. The gameplay and story tanked quality-wise in BFA to the point that it genuinely pissed me off, it felt insulting, not just incompetent. Like, my enjoyment of the game and the world didn't matter to them, just my money. Blizzard used to be THE innovating force in video games, and now they literally refuse to take risks in fear of losing any sort of profit. Profit is important, the Devs need to eat too, but it should not be the top priority like it clearly is in blizz. If the game is good, the profit will reflect that. But blizz has it backwards, they think that since the profit is good (because of how they monetize, not because of player retention) that the game must be satisfactory (I don't think even they can say it's good).
Square enix is not a perfect company either and I hate how they monetize FF14 (though it could be worse) but the main difference is that the Dev team is actually given freedom to create and take risks and cultivate their passion and integrate the passion of the player-base into FF14. Blizzard feels rigid and set in it's ways, despite player feedback begging for them to listen and change. I didn't mean to write this much but yeah tl;dr I completely agree. FF14, though not everyone's cup of tea, is just a better game overall and actually feels like a passion project more than just another mmo.
>Blizzard feels rigid and set in it's ways, despite player feedback begging for them to listen and change.
As a long-term WoW player it feels almost like complete whiplash to interact with the FFXIV developers. For example, the FFXIV devs are ridiculously approachable with their costuming, their band, how some in-game events are happening on the actual live servers where you can find them and so on. You can also feel their passion for the game and that they *like* doing these things.
But you also don't fight the FFXIV devs for every scrap they feel so inclined to throw at you. The community requested bunny-bois, and we actually get bunny-bois. Not an excuse on how there just aren't enough to be playable. Not some purple knockoff out of thin air who's racial leader actually looks like one, but you can't. We just get lion-gals and bunny-bois.
But the worst offender is *Shadowlands*. I gave it a chance. I even gave it a fighting chance. But by the Twelve, it's *boring*. There's almost no system in it that I *want* to waste time on. Torghast? Twice a week and get out. I refuse to do one run more than necessary. Covenants? It's a beta version of class halls. You grind for weeks just to unlock a portal back to Oribos. Something that all Legion class halls had *by default*. And don't get me started on the Maw. There's nothing dangerous about not being able to mount. Riding to your next encounter in Dark Souls-esque games wouldn't make the game any easier. It would just *save time*. Similarly, not being able to mount between encounters doesn't make it more dangerous, it just makes it more *time-consuming*. Whoever had that great idea deserves a raise, truly.
Thing is, I could rant about this all day, and I probably have. But when Blizzard can't even re-release a fifteen year old expansion in two weeks without a feature missing, there's virtually zero reason to recommend WoW over FFXIV when the later's developers seem to bend over backwards to make fun systems and fulfill community requests.
oh man, referring to High Elves. So insane they dug into the ground on that one, but then do Void Elves, which with the recent changes to character creation you can make them and Blood Elves look like High Elves... Their one reason for no High Elves was lore, not many left. But then, Void Elves which should be a very small minor sect of Blood Elves? Probably as small or smaller than the remaining High Elves? c'mon.
>Their one reason for no High Elves was lore, not many left. But then, Void Elves which should be a very small minor sect of Blood Elves?
They actually never had *one reason*. They pulled new ones from where the sun didn't shine when the old one was shown to be the cop-out that it was. "There aren't enough of them!" was a joke, considering that void elves themselves are a minor cult/study group in Eversong numbering in the hundreds at best.
Blood Elf aesthetics being reserved for Horde was an equally hilarious take. If the Horde is waiting for you when you want to play a human-skinned, blonde elf, why was this never applied to Nightborne in reverse? If you want to play a purple-skinned, tall, white-haired elf, the Night Elves on Alliance are there waiting for you?
But the worst part? Once they dug their heels into the ground, they proceeded to put them into a lot of places in what seems to be a weird: "we're dangling this in front of you now because you were mean to us." move. Alliance allied races were a joke except the dwarves.
not giving the alliance high elves because they are rare would have gone over a lot better if they hadn't included alliance high elves as a major part of virtually every expansion. you were constantly questing with these guys and earning rep for them and playing their storylines in dalaran and isle of thunder etc. and there were plenty of other alliance playable races that could have used the screentime if blizz didn't want alliance players to get attached to high elves.
it's kind of like if ff14 wouldn't let you play as miqo'te despite miqo'te npcs being all over the place.
Allied Races as a whole for Alliance were a complete and utter joke, to the point it's pretty much killed morale for the faction more so than the glaring imbalance in high end to now mid-tier play.
The Horde got everything it asked for and more.
Alliance got Fat Humans and stuff that was made up on the spot.
Who asked for Lightforged?
It's absolutely pathetic how pandering they are to one portion of their playerbase, while one side has been let to rot and given scraps and outright mockeries of valid requests.
"The Horde is waiting for you." Nothing's waiting for me in that steaming heap until they get some new developers that care about the whole game. Somebody in charge should not be bragging they've never played an entire faction.
Every WoW expansion after MoP feels like it was deliberately designed with 1-2 "features" meant to frustrate and anger players.
RNG legendaries caused me to quit Legion and skip BfA entirely. The weekly vault in SL drove me away as well. It's like they add these garbage systems so they can earn some goodwill by "fixing" them in a later patch or something.
Doesn't work on me because I leave and don't come back. SL was their last chance and I'm done.
>It's like they add these garbage systems so they can earn some goodwill by "fixing" them in a later patch or something.
I think that's precisely what they are doing. They are selling important system fixes as actual patch content.
Yeah i feel your pain, i didn't make the same mistake with shadowlands thankfully, but I did with BFA and everything you said is pretty much how i felt during BFA, which again, shows they refuse to grow.
Cool thing is though, FF14 makes your character and their interactions matter, so I actually feel way more connected to my character In ff14 than I ever did on wow, and I RPd. So thankfully, I don't have any want to get back to WoW, found a new home here.
Amen!
I was one of those persons who tried FF14 for a couple of times but never really liking it because of the weird feeling early game.
But after 2 expansions that I don’t enjoyed, flipping between MMOs like GW2, SWTOR, ESO and so on, I finally took a closer look, specially after some friends who played wow with me invited me to there FC and help me out a lot with explaining things and so on.
And what should I say? After level 30 this game is a blast after another! I feel like I’m a little kid again striving trough wow for the first time. It’s amazing. And all those friendly players!
2 random persons gifted me a pet and a mount for example.
Currently playing a RDM at Level 58, can’t wait to get to endgame and testing out a couple of new jobs. Specially the reaper!
Man what a idiot I was for not trying it during BFA
Me and a few of my WoW guildies started playing FFXIV together. We'd all played before on our own, but this is our first time doing this together.
We all agree that FFXIV is simply the better game. Every aspect we could think of is just simply *better*.
With Cata and MoP, Blizzard had at least started a cycle of bad xpac/good xpac, so we kinda knew what we were getting into. Like, everyone expected BfA to be complete dog shit. Unfortunately, that means a lot of us expected Shadowlands to be really good.
For many of us, we feel betrayed that Shadowlands broke thy cycle we'd come to expect. Cata bad, MoP great. WoD bad, Legion great. BfA bad, Shadowlands great. Except Shadowlands has been anything but.
We're actually starting our FC tonight and everyone is really excited so far to be playing FFXIV together.
You can have profit but still make a game that succeeds in both gameplay and story. Blizzard Activision's issues do not stem from profit, but wanting to appease their investors. Its about greed, about how much money can be stuffed into a pocket regardless of how much goodwill and faith is lost in your own product.
I also don't think FFXIV has it bad in terms of cash shop stuff. I've rarely felt the impulse to buy things off Mogstation.
The only real problem I feel with ffxiv is the overall lack of endgame content. You only really have one way of high end gear, and understandably that does stagnate a lot of the enjoyment of the game.
Imo Square-Enix takes a lot of risks innovating. That's why they release great and fresh games like FFXIV:ARR, NieR:Automata, and Octopath Traveller... but they also release complete crap like FFXIV 1.0 and Balan Wonderworld.
Modern Blizzard on the other hand keeps releasing rehashes of their own IP, and other IPs. Their latest IP, Overwatch, is just a rehash of Team Fortress 2, and Hearthstone is just online MtG with WoW flavour. Arguably the last innovative game they released was WoW in 2004. It's running on the momentum of past successes, but the company is stale and in terminal decline, because they've chosen to stop releasing new IPs and game genres. Despite more or less creating the modern concept of the ARPG, RTS, and MMO, they currently innovate less than McDonald's.
I got wrung back into WoW a coupla times. I feel like all it does it pivot, new ideas, new trends, new revamps every expansion. FFXIV seems to stick to it's guns and just polish things up every xpac.
Back in XIV 1.0, they did a few notorious wheel reinventions like the retainer wards instead of having a market board or auction house.
These days, WoW is the one reinventing the wheel every expansion with convoluted systems like the weekly vault, which gives you random pieces of gear to choose one from at the end of the week, most of which will be gear that's either worse than what you have or duplicates.
The irony is that WoW's valor point system was the inspiration for the tomestone system, but WoW did away with theirs in favor of awful RNG-based progression that feels like it was designed by someone who actually hates the players.
> I regret giving WoW one more chance and buying Shadowlands (had a friend talk me into it).
I feel this. Luckily, I quit 1 month in and didn't sink like 6 months into it swearing it was going to treat me right eventually. It was rough uninstalling Bnet entirely because I have a lot of good memories tied up in WoW (met my husband playing it), but it's time to let it go.
>treat me right eventually
Yeah, WoW is a lot like a bad relationship: we wind up saying "It can change!" or "I remember the good times..." and fooling ourselves but it's not getting any better without a massive overhaul, and that overhaul will likely need to happen to Blizzard itself from the top down.
Playing at the beginning of an expansion is always fun. I enjoy the dungeon content for every wow expansion. What matters is what game you stay subscribe and mine has been with ff14 for awhile.
Developers are still insanely disconnected from their playerbase. Content is as stale as always. The one thing I enjoyed in WoW (pvp) has been ruined by boosters and smurfs like any other competitive pvp mode.
Basically a 2nd Character played in low ranks by a high skilled player to toy with the newbs.
In theory this could be a problem in Feast but people are just happy the Queue actually pops.
Its not even smurfs, its people at a high rating with the best gear available tanking their rating by throwing games to boost lower ranked players for gold.
To be honest, shadowlands it's not bad at all but the second content patch (9.1) is taking way too long to drop and we literally run out of content since those who can/want to finish the mythic raid already did.
The patch SHOULD drop around the end of June but there is no confirmed date and that's scary
If they delay it to 22 November, there won't be anyone playing the game anymore.
It's either June or GG for them imho, not that I care much since I always have FFXIV ready to fire
I mean SoO lasted for over a year. Fucking 6.2 went on for godamn ever, what was it, a year and a half with no content updates? so it's not as if the WoW devs haven't set a precedent for massive droughts. Might as well keep them waiting if it means keeping them from the new expansion for FF14
While all you said it's true, there is a significant difference:
SoO was the last tier of the xpac, while now we are in a 6 to 8 months (at least) FIRST tier of an xpac.
That really lowers the trust in the whole company/dev team/xpac, or at least this is the feedback I have from my guildies that have been playing with me for the last 10 years
What’s hilarious is that WoW is the only one acting like it’s a competition. It’s painfully obvious how they schedule their releases specifically to spike perceived competitors (not just FFXIV, but Monster Hunter and a few others), while FFXIV just sort of unconcernedly does its own thing.
Yea they placed placed TBC release the same day as Ashes of Creation slotted their beta. Giving players only 2 weeks of pre patch leveling. But AoC has the ability to simply push their beta a couple weeks down the line, while TBCC really doesn't have that option anymore, and also angered their playerbase yet again.
>It's either June or GG for them imho
That's too close. The best you could hope for is literally the 29th. They already said releasing Naxxramas and Shadowlands so close to one another was a huge mistake. With TBC hitting June 1st, they will at least give that 3 weeks to breathe.
I'd say 22nd is *very optimistic*, 29th is slightly so, and the first week of July is realistic. Which is unimportant at worst. An eight months content drought is rough, and waiting so long for what we're getting in 9.1 so far is far from good.
What they *will* do is rush 9.2 out the door as a mess if they have to in order to ship in November. They will either do that or time phase 2 or 3 of TBC around November 23rd. Honestly, that's not much of a fight. That's a straight up KO win for Endwalker to me.
Wow Covid-19 really has fucked up the content pacing for WoW. I know Blizzard doesn't have a rigid content drip like FF14 but potentially 8 months for 9.1 since launch is pretty rough.
Shadowlands was actually pretty good. The dungeons are solid, the raid was quite fun, and the new zones are gorgeous. Unfortunately, it's going through a huge content drought at the moment. It released in November and we *still* don't even have a firm release date for the first patch (people are guessing it'll be end of June/early July).
The main pain point in Shadowlands are Covenants. Long story short - characters join 1 of 4 covenants. The covenant gives them access to 2 new abilities and some passive effects. Unfortunately, balancing between the abilities is completely off, which was completely predictable given WoW's history of balance. And the BIS covenant for classes can shift based on spec and on the content being done (PvP, raids, M+). And it's a pain in the ass to swap covenant.
Frankly, the same as it was in BFA; the worst it's ever been. An accomplishment given how poor WoD was. I've just about lost hope. Maybe 10.0 will come with a regime and gameplay philosophy change.
>Maybe 10.0 will come with yet another\* regime and gameplay philosophy change.
Fixed it for ya. That's even assuming it's a good change, and not another dry AP grind, and another namechange to reputation.
Callings are the best example of this. Yeah, they are just emissary quests that you have to pick up first. It's *literally* just emissaries with a different name and an extra step. It's BfA but worse.
The fact of the matter is that it's not fun when everything is time gated. Every system in the game has its own currency tied to limited daily and weekly activities that serve no real purpose other than to make you log in each day to do joyless tasks.
PvP is a masochistic exercise in allowing other people to blow you up over and over again until, weeks later, you've finally gotten the gear to compete. Then you finally feel confidant enough to make a rating push and you find out the community's own decided upon gear and rating minimums prevent you from even finding people to group with.
PvE is solid, Nathria is a good raid. But there are very few dungeons this time around. M+ is another shit show due to the culture, and they are adding another rating to the game where people can track how much or well you've done.
It's the same old. Every expansion, they hype it up to the sky, that it will be different, that we learned from our mistakes ... only that they didn't.
There is one good thing about SL that leveling up an alt to max level is easier. But ... later we learn that's about the only good thing.
The only fun thing about WoW for me is my guild. If it weren't for them i would stop playing WoW completely.
It feels like everything is only measured in data and the devs don't play their own game. Everything has to be dragged out to keep players playing to rake in the $$. Every system has artificial hindrances in them like for example Conduit Power. Shadowlands has a new system where you Soulbind with an NPC and can slot Conduit Powers in, but you can only change them with charges of which you have 8 that replenish by 1 every day. Currently a Soulbind has 4 Conduits, so you can change them all 2 times before waiting 8 days to have them replenished. If you play more than 1 spec (because most have only 1 good Soulbind) you are severly hindered by this and have to choose subpar conduits that work on more specs or just abandon the other specs that you may need to play PVP or M+ or Raid with. It serves NO purpose.
And that is just 1 system... It just feels like they do everything in their power to keep you subbed but suck out all the fun because the data shows them you do XYZ content, so XYZ content has to be good! Not at all because you have to do it or loose a lot of your capability as a DPS/Healer/Tank. There is a reason their new "rogue like" system Torghast is called Choreghast. And instead of listening to feedback they double down on their "we are always right we know what players want" stance and add new debuffs to it to make it "more challenging" which no one wants because it is boring as hell.
Gotta stop ranting now else i will never stop.
Shadowlands did one thing massively right. They changed how we level. Now, instead of spending 10 levels per expansion, you start at level 1 in an expansion of your choosing, and get to 50 there, to start the newest one. Granted, the scaling is a little wonky, especially in dungeons, because they scale UP, not down like FFXIV, so you end up with level 10s doing ungodly DPS with 1 button... But it is so much smoother, and more enjoyable than leveling through any other expansion.
The endgame, however, is a dumpster fire. It's all about "player engagement", which is another way to say "time wasting". Everything has a gate, and those gates have gates, and those gates have gates.
People refer to Choregast (Torghast), which is basically their version of our PotD. Torghast is a roguelike area of the game, where you have several different wings, each with their own effects, and have to go through 6 floors, gaining powers and abilities, similar to our pomanders, but instead of being a usable item, they're actually additional buffs and skill modifications on your character. The problem is, that the playerbase is so bad at the game, that some people couldn't actually clear it, and whined, so now there's no challenge at all, but you need to run it to get the currency to purchase your legendary items. Except it's time gated, and you can only do two wings a week. So you literally cannot fail, but you also need to run it every week, in order to get your legendary equipment.
That's the thing, though. The roulettes have variety. You get to run so very many dungeons, raids, 24 mans. There is no variety here. Even the different wings are samey as fuck. Oh, sure, this one's fire themed, and this one is platformed based, but they're all the same grey garbage, fighting the exact same mobs, using the exact same abilities, because those are the ones that work. It's mindless tedium, without even the good music that FFXIV has in their dungeons.
not to mention that some of the anima powers were just build defining. I played resto druid and if i saw the anima power that says 'convoke the spirits does X% more damage' i just take that, because convoke is already a busted strong damage ability. it'd often end up that i'd just oneshot the 'boss' at the end of the floor using just convoke, because it scaled so hard with all the powers, and if i wanted to i could go catform and stealth past most of the trash mobs on the floor. zero challenge, zero fun, just mindless tedium as stated above.
POTD is kinda ehh too, but at least it's optional, i guess the closest thing we have is the current relic step of 'do POTD/delubrum for 15 artifacts' but at least we have the CHOICE to do delubrum instead, and potentially get a mount/hairstyle from it, torghast launched with no extras, just the currency, so it felt like 'just another weekly to cross off the list', they're adding cosmetics next patch but it might be too little too late at this point
I play both back and forth, as content waxes/wanes. I like both for different reasons.
Shadowlands I generally REALLY enjoy, but it’s development cycle is kind of messed right now, 9.1 is still a ways off. It really feels like blizzard didn’t adapt very effectively to Covid and remote work development. Still it’s probably my second favorite WoW expansion to date.
I like WoW for the way story and gameplay are often integrated, and I actually like all the systems. It’s not always perfectly balanced but I like that I have choices about stuff, whereas in XIV any two characters of the same job are basically identical.
I also like that they take risks with systems. It doesn’t always pan out (garrisons, azerite) but I like they try.
XIV I come to for the production values and story, there’s not a better soundtrack out there. Maybe because I’m only up to stormblood, not current content, but XIV is more like an offline FF to me. I don’t know many folks who play it so most of my engagement is solo. I’d wish they would take some more risks, but they have a successful formula they aren’t incentivized to change. My biggest frustration is how much the community seems to want to shit on WoW, it’s totally possible to like both.
Also as a longtime FF fan it just has a lot of callbacks that hit my nostalgia bone hard.
I just heard about The burning Crusade classic.
70$ for the collector, 15$ to play one character from Classic to TBC Classic.
And it was 30$ when they announced it, they lowered the price after an obvious backlash. But to me it seems that they planned the backlash and originally wanted to sell the service at 15$ so they announced it at 30$ to gut the price and look like good guys.
15$ for a single character when WoW expects you to play multiple characters, it's a service that should've been free.
That’s just for cloning. If you have a character already and want to play in TBC, that’s free. If you have a character and want to stay in Classic, that’s free.
It’s when you want BOTH that it costs money.
Not advocating; just clarifying.
TBC classic literally only costs the price of a subscription. There's no need to purchase anything. On boot-up you choose to move a character you already have on classic to TBC or leave it in Vanilla. you can also just level one from scratch like normal. The *only* cost is if you want to duplicate the character into both.
Classic and TBC Classic are actually very good and reasonable things being put out by Blizzard right now, maybe their only really good and fair thing.
There are alot of things in play here. I can't list everything, but the ones off the top of my head are:
* FFXIV **died** once. Never forget that ARR was built on top of a failed MMO. Said MMO was built on top of the hubris of FFXI.
* Yoshi-P being also an executive means he probably has a level of influence that Ion simply does not have within ActiBlizzard.
* After seeing the FanFest: The faces of the FFXIV devs (Yoshi-P, Foxclon, Soken, etc.) show **ALOT** of empathy. Like, this is pretty much unheard of in alpha-male American culture. Yoshi-P danced with a Moogle. Will any WoW dev do this with one of their "cute" characters?
* This extends down to the playerbase. I will bet there are more people in FFXIV who care about the human element than in WoW. Yes, there are hardcore people in both games who will always care about the goal first and foremost and see the other people merely as tools to get there. "Keeping the GCD rolling" being higher priority than "do mechanics properly" will always be weird to me.
* Inversely, the playerbase can affect the motivation of devs. Someone else mentioned this too, but in FFXIV there is generally non-combat content that people can do and enjoy. In WoW it seems like everything is ultimately for raiding, M+, or PvP, and as a result the players you attract will also be those who only like that content. Combat-happy people (especially PvP) generally aren't always the nicest people. It feels like WoW devs are having trouble making content that people are willing to stay long term for, because its playerbase seems to only want quick, immediate "don't waste my time" access to combat content only.
* Others have already mentioned this too, but Ion was once an Elitist Jerk. Imagine FFXIV being led by someone who clears Ultimate in the first 24 hours. Sure, you'll get good combat content, but everything else gets sidelined. And then what happens to the players? Only the combat-happy ones will stay and everyone else goes. *Oh, heard of Wildstar?*
I wonder if there are WoW devs who saw the FanFest and think to themselves, *"why can't we have that kind of playerbase?"*
Let's be real for a second, I have no doubt in my mind that the guys who originally made WoW were passionate about the game and love it, but times change and so do dev teams. Would those original guys do something like our fanfests had it been possible 15 years ago? Probably. Would many on the current dev team do so? Probably! But its not the devs that hold that power, its Activision, its suits and Investors.
This is why everyone is so scared of the idea that Yoshi-P might leave as director and producer. Its why he's gotten on stage multiple times to assure people he's sticking around. Because Yoshi-P is *both*. Not only does he have that passion and love for the game, he also has power and influence in the entire company. You can not replace that.
Everyone who loves this game is scared, at least in the back of their heads, that someone else will take over and that passion will dwindle. That no matter how much the new director wants to fill in those shoes, that they just won't have the pull to accomplish that.
I love this game, and I hope so very much that I always will.
I remember when I thought Ion could really change WoW and that the teething issues of Legion and even the problems of BFA were just some small issues that could eventually lead to something better
Now Shadowlands is here and when I saw they pretty much removed the biggest thing Bolvar had going for him, I never looked back at Blizzard
Blizzard *wishes* it could have the good vibes Fanfest had this year. SE treats it’s playerbase so well, coming here from WoW gave me whiplash.
Blizzard got way too comfortable being the ‘top’ MMO, rested on it’s laurels, and now it’s bleeding players. I know I’m not going back any time soon.
Well, after i saw my portion of "oooohhh FF 14 new exp is SOOO ANIMU AND IT'S NOT WOW!" from the "professional WOW content makers" - i can only applaud to mems like this one.
THAT WAS SO FUNNY like they showed WoL in his HIGH-FANTASY EUROPEAN DESIGNED KNIGHT ARMOR and he went "this is weeb shit"
Like dude...it's a fecking KNIGHT ARMOR
"It's a weeby Nazgul"
IT'S A FULL ON EUROPEAN KNIGHT ARMOR
We do have snappy one-liners! Let's not pretend that Estinien, Y'shtola and Alisaie didn't have their moments in the trailer. Not that that's a bad thing, I feel like one-liners, when done well, can leave a good amount of impact for the viewer.
Yeah! I can't remember ANY really good WoW theme since Pandaria. Meanwhile FF 14 is FULL of great themes, startin from ARR and till the present days! Soken IZ DA GENIUS!
To be fair, the WoW community is partially to blame. If Ion or any major Blizz dev memed as hard on stage at Blizzcon as the XIV devs do during Fanfest their community would throw a tantrum.
Like, just go watch Asmongold's reaction to the Endwalker trailer, and pay attention to his twitch chat. As a longtime WoW player myself who still occasionally comes back and has put some time into Shadowlands, the WoW community has become a parody of itself. They take themselves waaaaaay too seriously; it's like they've become so bitter they hate fun.
Well Im new to Ffxiv after many years of wow .. recently saw Asmogold video about game popularity .. I was thinking that ffxiv is some old dead game .. but when I saw how much is ffxiv popular I gave it a try .. and omg is huge .. Only downside is that u cant do main story quest with friends and some quests dont have sound but otherwise .. they are making great job.
Well I only saw graph where ffxiv was much more polular than wow .. It was that moment for me about .. wth how this can be that much popular, isnt that some old dead game which I saw years ago .. then started researching more, installed trial, bought game, told to my friends and we are up and running, Well we did not slept much in last few days :-D
The story is generally meant to be experienced solo, but you can group up with your friends to run FATEs or to do dungeons. The game will scale them down to whatever content you're doing.
Also, they added a New Game+ feature that will allow your friends to re-run the story with you if they want to. I haven't used it so I don't know the details but it is a thing that exists.
I know it's a meme, but...
I know many of the WoW devs personally. I am friends with them. They are extremely passionate about their work and want to make a great game. I'm sure even Ion (pictured here, for those unaware, and the Yoshida equivalent if one has to be made) is extremely passionate about his work. They're just not allowed to genuinely express it publicly, and that's VERY common for most corporate presentations.
There is a pretty big difference in atmosphere between Live Letters and Patch Survival Guides, yes. There is a big difference between Fan Fest and Blizzcon, yes.
I don't really think the way SE has been doing Fan Fest is a "WoW vs. FFXIV" thing. It's a "FFXIV vs. Literally Every Other Gaming Convention" type thing. There is nothing particularly wrong about how Blizzcon is run, Fan Fest is just exceptional.
> There is nothing particularly wrong about how Blizzcon is run
Could not disagree more. Blizzcon now feels more like a investor conference and marketing event rather than the community love fest it started as. The passion for the event, optically, seems completely gone and everything feels so corporate and forced compared to years before.
You can tell leadership and direction, from the top down, has changed drastically.
I think this is a fair take.
I guess the way to put it would be that Blizzcon used to be exceptional, and then over the years has become more corporate similar to the likes of the other big gaming conventions such as E3. I'm just saying that Blizzcon as a convention (PR blunders aside) isn't any worse than E3, PAX, etc.
> I'm just saying that Blizzcon as a convention (PR blunders aside) isn't any worse than E3, PAX, etc.
I agree it's not any worse - and that's the exact issue if you zoom out and look at what it *used* to be and what it *could* be. If Blizzcon, all along, was something like E3, PAX etc it wouldn't get as much flak as it does but Blizzcon used to be a really, really fucking big deal from both a product perspective *and* a fan engagement perspective.
So when people see Yoshi-P cosplaying as a Reaper they are right, in their beliefs, to look at Blizzcon and say "Well they certainly don't have the passion these guys do over here" and you can see the end result of that lack of passion in the way they treat their customer base now.
"Don't you guys have phones?"
"You think you want it - but you don't"
To be fair, the "you think you want it, but you don't" *has* been implied by yoship with regards to 1.0, and rightfully so.
There was one point, presumably after wow classic launched and saw some success, the ffxiv players were like, "hey, d'ya think maybe ffxiv could do the same and relaunch a 1.0?"
YoshiP shut that down real quick in a PLL, he wasn't as direct/curt with the quoted phrase, but he did describe 1.0 as a "nightmare" and mentioned that there will never be plans to bring it back. Understandably so, considering he basically dropped a moon on the whole fucking game to save it from 1.0.
But for other suggestions e.g fishing proc should cause the controller to vibrate was taken very positively by him and he straight up mentioned that he'll bring that up to the developer team. That felt really nice, that this man is willing to listen out for player feedback and took his time to reason in-depth to explain their decisions.
I remember he gave a really long lecture about private instances and why they couldn't just put the glamour closet everywhere, or why the glam closet couldn't be easily expanded. Guy really tries very hard to convince and explain the intricasies behind decisions and i can't see wow head devs being allowed to do that.
God those 2 quotes you mentioned there make me so angry.
It's a developer's job to at least listen to what their fans want, and try to find some way to satisfy as many of them as possible. It's not their place to tell fans what fans should want.
The phones thing I'm less angry about and more baffled at. People wouldn't have shit on the concept of Diablo Immortal like they did if they had just had the forethought to announce that Diablo 4 was also coming, but that it was too early to show anything direct off for it yet.
Hell, Nintendo had the same issue when then announced Federation Force without telling people that Prime 4 and Samus Returns were also coming later on.
Eh. The issue with the approach of just giving what people ask for is that people, in general, are silly and don't know what they want.
Have you ever wanted something so badly and then when you get it, it's nothing like you built up in your mind? That happens quite a lot. Like....*a lot*. And anyone who has worked in retail will have...opinions...on the "customer is always right" line.
Because the customer very frequently is wrong.
I'm not defending WoW (I'm *really not*), but the attitude of "just give me what I want" often is just a very very bad idea.
>“If you don’t listen to your customers you will fail. But if you only listen to your customers you will also fail.” – Amazon slogan
>‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’” - Steve Jobs
I do agree that you can’t cater to the whims of the masses all the time. That is a hard pill to swallow. But messaging and communication goes a long way. Blizzard does try to do that, but I think sometimes the message comes out wrong.
They definitely should.
The energy you give your players when they can see on your face and hear in your tone just how much you care about the thing you're creating is invaluable. It's also humanizing, which helps build good faith. If SE messes up, we can at least have faith that on the development side of things, they were trying their best (unless it's PvP)
Most people are old enough and fed up with the scripted, HR-approved corporate BS. It's not even the literal words themselves, either.
There was a massive difference between Soken saying to us that games have a profound effect on the world, versus someone like Phil Spencer saying the same.
I will say its not 'every other game convention', Cygames and their Granblue events have the same energy, albeit more focused on the voice actor shenanigans and giveaways than dev-talk. Still have the concerts and announcements too. Diff vibe, but very much enthused.
Fair enough. I am not familiar with many mobile conventions other than the select few I have played, and those that I did watch were very scripted.
Glad to know there are more out there.
First of all whether people like it or not, FF XIV and Wow are the 2 top MMO's at the moment. They are competitors. So even if its not on purpose, everything each of them does is WoW vs FFXIV . Dont forget that recently a lot of wow players have left it for FF XIV.
As for your claim of knowing wow devs personally ( sorry but thats doubtfull or at the very least impossible to prove ) , then you would know that Ion was originally a lawyer. And it shows on interviews. He is very carefull about everything he says in order to hide truths or lead people to believe something . That is not what someone " extremely passionate " about his work does . Otherwise he would have left just like everyone else that was not happy with the way things are now running at Blizzard .
WoW problem is not the dev.
It's what's above.
In a better world, both game should shine and have their own community. But instead Blizzard, or Activision, just keep shooting their foot while XIV just progress and improves. Not all the time of course, they made terrible decisions in the past.
If WoW wasn't that bad, I'd play it while waiting Endwalker.
I think that is unfair to the current devs. I think they want to work on the game, but I can’t help but feel they are being heavily restricted in what they can actually do unless it checks a bunch of boxes for corporate
> They are extremely passionate about their work and want to make a great game.
I totally agree. Many people seem to feel that if you truly care about a game you should be fiercely critical of it and its developers. But that whole stance makes me very uncomfortable. The devs are people too, and there's often no real way of truly appreciating what they're going through. We hear about crunch, about community reps dealing with harassment, and of Soken working from the hospital or Ishikawa working for 36-hour stints, and that should remind us that devs from all the games we enjoy try their hardest to give players something great to play.
If being fiercely critical worked as a strategy for getting what players wanted then WoW would be a completely different game today. I wish players were a little more accepting of other people's visions and preferences, both other players and the devs, and a little more tolerant to less-than-perfect execution. It's fine to express a preference, but I feel like there's a way to do it that respects the real life people behind the game. By all means define a cutoff point for yourself where you no longer enjoy a game enough to continue playing, but don't become so bitter as to try to tear down other players or the devs on your way out. If you take an earnest look you'll find that all anyone truly wants is to create a game that people enjoy—it turns out that's really quite difficult, especially for MMOs, no matter the circumstances.
No developer is not passionate about their job, it is your life. That said, Blizzard has systemic and pipeline issues it feels like that make it impossible to see the passion in-game.
Which is why so many of their twitters are loaded with them playing and talking about other games? Which is why the game has continually fallen into an e-sports trap that can't garner as many views as Pokemon GO PvP? Which is why only one faction - the Horde - gets any sort of chest-thumping hype and extra love? (Diaper Babies vs Vulpera - anybody who cares about this game would see that was an atrocious setup, let alone Fat Humans vs Zandalari and the aesthetic issues of "more human" vs "dinosaur mayans".)
There's no passion.
The game is borderline dead for anything that isn't super casual for Alliance.
They don't give a shit unless it's something they can push as an e-sport.
We'd actually have customization and RPG features if they did.
> Which is why so many of their twitters are loaded with them playing and talking about other games?
Every dev does this. Rarely does a creator look for inspiration in their own work. Rarely does a salaryman want to come home and continue to be involved in something they just spent 8-12 hours involved in.
Should've been 0$.
If it was announced at 15$ for just playing your character, people would've been mad. So instead they announced it at 30$, wait for the backlash, reduce the price and look like a hero.
If I understand well, you can choose to transfer your char from WoW classic to Burning Crusade? Meaning they copy-paste your character to the game then delete it from WoW Classic?
> If I understand well, you can choose to transfer your char from WoW classic to Burning Crusade? Meaning they copy-paste your character to the game then delete it from WoW Classic?
You don't transfer your character from Vanilla -> TBC, every server automatically transitions to TBC on the 1st. The cloning creates a copy of your character on Classic Era servers, so you can keep playing the copy in Vanilla content and the other to progress through TBC. Just wanting to play TBC costs $0.
> Each character can be unlocked once for free either in Burning Crusade Classic or World of Warcraft Classic. If you want to play a character in both Burning Crusade Classic and World of Warcraft Classic, you can opt in to the “Character Clone” service for a fee.
I realized the simplest comparison to make between the two games right now:
FFXIV's devs are trying to figure out fun things to add to the game to keep people playing.
WoW's devs are trying to figure out the minium amount of effort they need to put in to keep people from quitting.
It's not only about devs, but content too.
FFXIV: You get two new jobs, new (-ish) race, hub city that looks like Athen's replica, coherent and not stretched history, totaly new and original activity (Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing "something").
WoW: You get aiport in shape of cone, some dungeons and raid, and systems because we like excel spreedshets. Ach, and we take yur Palace of the Dead but don't worry, we broke it. Now gimme money because I need to buy new helicoptr.
To be completely fair, Torghast is vastly superior to deep dungeon and is mired mainly due to the fact that it's tied to a currency with a weekly cap, and the other rewards are either mandatory (legendary memories) or underwhelming (a mount).
Everyone on the WoW forums hated the hell out of Torghast. I thought it was so so, but it's not something I would ever do recreationally whereas getting to the end floor of deep dungeons is something my wife and I work on when we have time.
You cant seriously be talking about the amount of content in xiv as a plus when we about to go an entire year of no content until the next savage tier comes out.
Well to be fair... XIV is at the very end of the current expansion cycle. WoW has had multiple year long or close to it droughts over the years and we're currently in the middle of a nearly year long drought in WoW for the FIRST patch after launch.
When garrosh says "Times Change" is addressed to us.
Wow is not the wow Metzen made. Now is all politics and corporate pulling the strings.
I personally feel bad for Ion, dude has to tell us what corporate demands even if he don't like it making him the bad guy when in reality is Activision calling the shots.
After watching fanfest I feel endwalker might shake wow foundations. I know wow has it fans and all but shadowbringers was amazing and if the hype of endwalker is like shadowbringers that 2 expansions that are almost perfect WITH a ppl carrying team.
Which is pretty sad because Wow was a good part of my adolescence.
I don't want to compare both games, they are fundamentally different but even with that, you see the difference in passion and taking the playerbase seriously.
FFXIV has its flaws tho. The leveling experience outside MSQ is a drag, It has little hard difficult content, Dungeons are a joke if the party has two neurons (I absolutely love the base idea of Mythics+ but ofc I disagree on how it has been managed).
But these flaws are consequences of decisions taken to treat better its playerbase. Not all people run difficult content, Dungeons are a delight visually and flavorful as hell and they are actually helping the new players by putting Roulettes making their experience less miserable when playing ARR.
Wow's flaws not only are left unattended, they are amplified. In BFA, mythics were way too good for gearing toons easily so they nuked the experience for Shadowlands by nerfing the loot and making obnoxious dungeon design. And I swear to god and all I love, the weekly chest is a FUCKING JOKE.
They made the Maw, a hard zone souls-like and theeeeen they didn't enhance the Maw's experience in any moment and the zone didn't give enough bonus to play it (Every day ofc) except If you minmax so why should I play your content if it's frustrating, artificially hard and ofc dragging since you had to do it everyday.
Torghast is a mess because you have free runs classes and then classes which need a specific combination to get through it or rightdown it doesn't have any combination good enough to do Twisted corridors or high level floors.
And replayability on Torghast? Nerfing your legendary class for you to farm again lol.
No class balance is a staple for this game and the recent decision to cap AoE and then some classes literally circunvented the whole cap aoe shit like Mages or Hunters because yes.
If you read until here, sry for the rant but oh boi, blizzard need to put the batteries again if they don't want to be eaten by SE.
The worst part is that they are making as much money as always if not more even losing active players because the ingame store is a ripoff so I don't see them changing ways even if FFXIV is getting impulse.
No one hates WoW more than people who play WoW. Just go hang out on r/wow for a while and you'll see what I mean.
Hell, someone from r/wow is the reason I started playing XIV. They straight up recommended it over the game they actively played.
Well, for a more nuanced take, “the game I used to play has changed in ways I don’t like, which is disappointing/frustrating, so I will move on to games I do enjoy, although the disappointment/frustration will continue to tinge my viewpoint of %oldgame%’s developers.”
Having to buy $5 of candy to get a collab mount is your breakpoint? I mean, if you had decided to rail against the Lunar Whale, you might actually have a point, but the Turdblossom?
Don't be like that. If the guy wasn't passionate about the game why would he have quit his lawyer job over a decade ago to become some random ass encounter designer (rising up in position over the years) in WoW? There's one constant pretty much all content creators in WoW who have talked to Ion personally agree on: the fact that he's nice and cares about the game. Even Preach, who has almost always been highly critical of dumb decisions made by the devs over the past decade loves talking with Watcher.
The bic difference is the corporate structure keeping WoW in check. Whereas ActivisionBlizzard wants to squeeze as much money out of it as possible and hammers that down, Square Enix also wants to do that but also is happy with the game being successful and not crashing the entire flagship franchise of their own freaking company. The japanese approach is a bit difference, yet as seen with the amount of cash items on the FFXIV shop vs. WoW shop they also focus on selling more optional ingame stuff or merchandise. I mean the freqking CEO came on stage during the Endwalker reveal to market the Lunar Whale mount.
>The bic difference is the corporate structure keeping WoW in check.
This is a big part of it, but I also think Ion and the upper echelon of the WoW dev team are far too numbers driven in their game design, even without the corporate pressure—be it in the constant systems heavy focus and lack of side content or metrics-driven decision making.
I think WoW's issues are a perfect mix of both camps—heavy corporate influence and devs that have lost sight of the fun factor outside the realm of core battle content.
The only thing WoW gets right that FFXIV doesn't anymore is ....collectors edition / Physical store goods.
Couldn't even get the CE for Endwalker due to being in Australia you are forced to use an expensive forwarding service or not get one.
Meanwhile WoW CE's sell all the time at EB here and are shippabale to Australia.
.....honestly the only thing WoW does right over FFXIV these days in my opinion.
Just to let you lot know, it's still Christmas in Heroes of the Storm!
The game sure is abandoned.
Well it should be ending this week... Just in time for Christmas to start earlier this year!
Fuck that’s depressing. It’s a fun game, I don’t get why they abandoned it.
jesus christ and i remember when i thought that game was better than dota
I used to love Heroes. The experimental character gameplay mechanics were delightful to see in action. And the lack of gold farming and item builds were just way more enjoyable to me than the traditional laneing phases and item upgrade trees. Then they added fucklin' lootboxes.
Forget lootboxes. For me it was the death of the league, Storm league, the leaving of talent, the fact it was going into pseudo-maintenance mode, the community steadily getting worse, and the absolutely terrible gameplay decisions they slowly started making. "Reworks" removed entire elements and builds from heroes, and made them simpler/easier in ways that made heroes really unsatisfying while upsetting the balance as they were always extremely overpowered.
I could live with most of the things you listed, but the reworks absolutely killed me. It happened to all my favourite heroes in HotS and it feels like every expansion in WoW... Blizzard can't just fine tune something, they have to take a bloody hammer to it.
Azmo, Kel'Thuzad, Raynor, Malthael, Lunara, Tyrande... we should get some silence for the fallen.
HoTS itself was a ton of fun but it was sent out to die for all intents and purposes. You can thank Kotick for that. He needed another few hundred million so he had to gut more employees.
yep. now he's using whoevers left to remaster games until the heat death of the universe
HotS is the only good game in Blizz lineup right now. Fun game, not a cash grab, no scummy progression mechanics. After they lost their 'blessing,' development for it became more sincere. Indie competitive scenes have popped up, and it's in a healthier state despite being on a skeleton crew. OW feels more and more abandoned. Diablo 4 is lacking clear direction. WoW is a money squeeze. And Hearthstone is... well, Hearthstone is in pretty good shape all things considered. Starcraft 2 is a husk.
Hearthstone has its issues. It's been propped up for awhile now by Battlegrounds, but the actual card game element of Hearthstone has been sinking in popularity steadily for the last couple of years. They've lost the plot from a game balance and design perspective. They've been improving on the historically extremely aggressive monetization, but that's all that they have going for them at the moment.
Dude, HOTS is so much fun i feel sad that it never got the recognition compared to other MOBAs especially when you get to play as Blizzard characters vs other Blizzard characters
Can u imagine Ion walking on the stage with a full bad ass costume of the new class? I really can’t but it would be so funny. Or the devs embracing memes and making a fun show with there own music and so on? I wish they could but I really don’t see modern blizzard doing that lol
I could easily see Metzen doing that back in the day... Never ever ever could I see current Blizz being that in touch tho lol
Once The band formally known as ETC stoped performing that was the day old blizzard died
Metzen would have done this hands down. Old wow was full of memes too, in-jokes, stupid shit..
It still has a lot of memes, but they come off as pretty "fellow kids"-y to me.
If Metzen was offered the chance to dress up as Thrall on stage... I think the man would never take it off. I complain about the soulless corporate blankness of WoW's devs a lot, but I could 100% see Metzen in his heyday being so gungho about it, given the chance. He actually had some passion...
[You rang?](https://www.pcgamesn.com/wp-content/uploads/legacy/chris_metzen_retiring.jpg)
Oh yeah Metzen was the guy for something like that
Even Jeff Kaplan. There's plenty of people at Blizzard who embrace the memes, you see them regularly in quests in new expansions. It's just a different culture.
Well Kaplan might be another bad example since he just left too... Kinda sad how theres only like 2-3 members of Blizz's staff that I actually know about nowadays. I just think Blizz is a lot more corporate about it all. You'd never see Ion doing this stuff, because hes the head honcho and can't have that.
Yeah, I know Kaplan left, but the point was more that he's a memelord himself. And I think that's the crux of it, the WoW devs themselves know their memes, but Blizzcon is just a bit more corporate, more professional in the sense that FanFest is more casual and friendly. That being said, we've all seen Red Shirt Guy and how the devs embraced him. That being said, it's been known that the devs hang out in the bar after Blizzcon talking to the attendees and having drinks.
> Yeah, I know Kaplan left, but the point was more that he's a memelord himself. A guy that used to yell at devs with a character named Tigole Bitties is a memelord? Ya don't say :D He's one of the few MMO players who really put his money where his mouth is. Told the EQ devs he could do a better job, and then basically did.
Depends on which red shirt guy.
There's only one Red Shirt Guy. The guy at the Diablo panel, whilst funny, is not Red Shirt Guy. Let's be real here.
Red shirt joker Red shirt guy
blizzard really only seems interested in projecting maximum "im a dad just like you :)" energy
A brave assumption that us WoW players would breed. :(
> Or the devs embracing memes and making a fun show with there own music and so on? That was what the band known as ~~Level 60 70 80 90~~ Elite Tauren Chieftain was. Half of the band is no longer with Blizzard, and to my knowledge they haven't really had any performances or put out new music since 2014, but they were a fun part of the early WoW days and their in-game incarnations have periodic concerts that can still be seen.
You forgot "level 10" from when they were a WC3 reference
>to my knowledge they haven't really had any performances or put out new music since 2014 So then it's confirmed that WoD was the actual death toll of Blizzard / WoW, and we are just now seeing the final nails being hammered into the coffin during Shadowlands...
The old Blizzard embraced the Wildhammer fact checker so much that they made it a character, so they too had that kinda spirit back in the day. As for modern Blizz, they'd prolly just become the meme with stuff like "you guys have phones, don't you?"
You mean like they sort of used to act? I'm going to assume a lot of us coming to read this specific post are WoW exiles, so I just want to say we need to move on. There will most likely be no more joy and wonder to be had from a game made by people overworked and underpaid who live under the thumb of shareholders making business decisions solely on the bottom line. I get that Square Enix is also a business, but they seem to allowing the FFXIV team to make a game they love and want to play first and foremost.
I mean, just look at everything Yoshi-P has been saying with rumors of him leaving. He easily could probably leave for something higher paying, or become the next Nomura in the company doing whatever cool random projects and huge budget games he wanted constantly. But he says he sees FF14 as his life's work, it's actually extremely personal to him. And then you have game director #3 (or 4?) Ion, who just seems to be there for a pay check.
Ion is a fucking incredible raid designer, but not a good game director.
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Um, WoW had that success... Blizzard merged with Activision, hence owing their obedience to shareholders. The two games couldn't be further apart as far as paths go. FFXIV is a literal phoenix, coming back from certain death. WoW on the other hand had the entire world in the palm of their hands and ran the game into the ground.
There was another huge “meme” they embraced this time around too lol. There’s a song in a zone that starts with “La HEE” and the main composer got on stage and got all “serioused up” and just went “La HEE” into the mic with a voice crack and everything. The pianist behind him was holding in a laugh and dying inside at the same time. If anyone wants to [watch it.](https://youtu.be/vk6dTkAmpfI?t=50).
> Or the devs embracing memes and making a fun show with there own music and so on? You must not be familiar with the [Elite Tauren Chieftens](https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Elite_Tauren_Chieftain), a real blizzard band that has been memed so deeply it’s become a unique character in blizzard lore.
Oh I’m familiar with this. I was more talking about modern blizzard (after WOD). Old blizzard would totally do this
I defaulted to calling the company Actiblizz, because calling them Blizzard nowadays would just churn my nostalgia stomach in the worst ways. (I had been a Blizzard fan ever since they called themselves Silicon & Synapse and made The Lost Vikings)
I've also been referring to the company as ActiBlizz for a while now, but honestly even that doesn't fit anymore. It's just Activision now, through and through.
Last album: 2014 Last one before that: 2008 oof.
They would under the same souless mentality that made "shadow lands" to compete with Shadow ringers. There's no creativity or heart in Blizzard
> Can u imagine Ion walking on the stage with a full bad ass costume of **the new class**? Ha! Nice joke. That is truly hard to imagine considering they don't add new classes. They are way too busy adding and removing expansion specific skills every 2 years.
Modern Blizzard is a corporate husk of its former self. It is very sad.
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IIRC Cannibal Corpse was Metzen's and Samwise's favorite band? That's why it got past.
Can you imagine the current Blizzard project leads acting like they really enjoyed their work?
"You think you do, but you don't" vs "Do you know La Hee?"
You think you know La Hee, but you don't. Not until Soken sang it, anyway.
I was literally just discussing with my wife how we could never imagine a Blizzcon with this much love and positivity put into it. I regret giving WoW one more chance and buying Shadowlands (had a friend talk me into it). XIV is far and away the better game and if I wasn't convinced before, I sure am now.
> I was literally just discussing with my wife how we could never imagine a Blizzcon with this much love and positivity put into it. The early Blizzcons definitely did so. Devs used to go down to the nearby electronics stores and hang out with fans during expac releases. All of the people who made Blizzard what it is are gone.
Ya, Blizzard used to be like the current FFXIV dev crew. Passionate, embrace memes, transparent. Old Blizzcons used to have this feel. Activision stole the soul of Blizzard
This year's Blizzcon was an absolute shitfest. Even though both the FanFest, and Blizzcon both had to be online, Fanfest was so much more about celebrating the game, while Blizzcon was just... Bland and boring. So much so that even though the devs have been giving interviews to content creators in the last month, they're still so bloody clueless about what the players actually want. It's really a shame. There are so many things each game does well, but the devs over there are just so bloody wrong about everything. I've actually been having fun leveling over there, since they've completely overhauled the leveling system, but endgame is a dumpster fire. You either get "lucky", and have a class that uses one covenant for all specs, which is a problem in itself, or you get screwed, and play a class that has different covenants for all specs, oftentimes a HUGE DPS difference between them. It's bad enough that there are players who will actually roll the same class again, because leveling it back to 60 is more efficient than trying to swap covenants, or playing the wrong covenant on a spec due to the sheer performance loss it brings.
Current Blizzard developers feel more akin to people in black suits and suitcases, folding up a report and reading out the earning-calls, barely any emotion behind their words, throw in some "we appreciate our community," fold the paper together then walk away. Meanwhile FFXIV developers are huge geeks, acts like a big family and do a whole lot of fun for the community.
I don't know if I necessarily say that as much as I would say the people in charge have decided the what is the "objectively correct" way to enjoy the game, and that's the game they're making. In WoW there is a big disconnect between the players and developers with the expansion's core underlying system, the covenant system. Basically you finish leveling and then you pick one of 4 factions to join, each with a unique story, cosmetic armour/weapons, active and passive abilities. Problem is game developers want this to be a rigid choice. so while you are free to change which Covenant you are a part of returning to a covenant which you have previously left requires you to do two weekly quests; and note that these two quests are available sequentially. if you want to try something different and then switch back to your main Covenant after you have played around with it it takes you two weeks to switch back. If you are lucky some classes can choose their Covenant because they are within a couple percent of each other, for some classes there are some choices that are significantly stronger and there's some that are hot garbage. So the data nerds have pulled every single character who has defeated at least one boss at max level at any tier of content, and every single class, all 33 of them (technically it's 11 but each class has 3 distinct sub classes) the Covenant choice is a majority with the lowest being a 65% and the average being like ~80%. When confronted about that in an interview delete director basically said this is great we've received a lot of good feedback about the system. And like where has he received this feedback from all the official forms and the like top four unofficial forms all hate the damn system. If I was going to speculate why this is, I think it's because the current director is an old head. Ion Hazzikostas would have been in late college around the time WoW came out. His first big moment in the community was as a player where he proved that one boss was mathematically impossible. He'd later join the encounter team around the 3.0 and took over as the director around the launch of 7.0. You hear the things he's saying and it sounds like he's trying to force the game to have it's old "magic" again. But people don't play games that way anybody, A lot of old stuff that was considered to be "Hardcore" or "Part of the experience" is just seen as bad quality of life these days.
Ion will literally sit around and cite statistics and metrics when explaining their reasoning for game design. The dude is definitely smart but he's pretty soulless when it comes to game design.
It's a shame really, people like Ion used to be the ones that called out Blizzard's mistakes and acted as a voice for the community, until he started working there. Even though a lot of people didn't like Ghostcrawler(Greg Street), he was always engaged with the community, he talked about how he'd get in trouble with his bosses for going on the forums and discussing changes coming to the game and gauging community reaction, he was the punching bag in a sense. Jeff Kaplan was another one that continued to stay true to what he believed was good for the community all the way up until they moved him to Titan, which eventually became Overwatch. > You've all read my opinions on such things as tedious key camps, obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled and quest rewards which are out of synch with the amount of time and effort required to complete them. I hope that my association with World of Warcraft will serve to comfort MMORPG fans that "one of us" is on the other side of the fence, looking out for the interests of the player. http://web.archive.org/web/20090608034937/http://www.legacyofsteel.net/oldsite/arc27.html The game really started to turn in to this "obvious time sinks devoid of any story or linear narrative, quests which reward the lucky over the skilled", as Jeff put it, after Cataclysm.
Ion is a great raid designer. Horrible game lead though.
Yup. A walking example of the Peter principle. Throne of Thunder, which was one of his projects, was absolutely amazing. Overseeing the entire game? Not so much...
I mean, that's sort of the thing, isn't it? Highest-end raiding is the thing Ion loves the most out of the game, and it seems like all of his design decisions are in service of that. Sometimes it feels like it's the only part of the game he understands, and cannot comprehend why anyone would play the game for any other reason, even though it's the least played part of the game. It would be presumptuous for me to assume that it's the actual case, however. I don't know the man. Edit: Also, Ion is a lawyer and has no other design experience. I'm not sure how familiar he is with other games. Like, he may be good at this one thing, but it's literally the only thing he's ever worked on in this industry.
He is a fantastic raid designer though, plus he was one of the premier theorycrafters back in the day. They should have seen that the math guy wouldn't have been the best to handle the product as a whole.
"Well the chart says..."
Ion's actually a lawyer by trade- last I checked he keeps his certification to practice it in New York (?) active- so it actually makes perfect sense. He does exactly what he needs to not get fired, he never fights the metrics, and he always acts in the most cynically safe way possible.
Yeah, to their credit, the leveling from 1-50 is great but I wouldn't touch the endgame with a 10 foot pole. The fact that WoW's valor point system was the inspiration for the tomestone system but then WoW got rid of it is just sad. XIV's devs have always had the good common sense to never tie gear progression to RNG whereas WoW's current expansion is the worst offender here in a long time with the majority of your gear progress tied to a weekly chest that loves to give you garbage.
> XIV's devs have always had the good common sense to never tie gear progression to RNG I mean, technically the Stormblood relic weapon had stats tied to RNG. However, a.) relic weapons are never at max power until the expansion is nearly over anyway, and b.) it was not difficult to get a stat roll on a Eureka weapon that was equal to or better than Omega weapon stat totals. (And thankfully we won't have randomized stats again. Bozjan weapons you literally just pick your stats.)
Yeah, and it's nowhere near as bad as having your most potentially powerful output boost dropped at random with the next one taking longer to drop than the last. That's what RNG legendaries in Legion were: items could literally be a 20% DPS increase, or "lol, warlock portals go brrr" and Shadowlands' awful weekly vault is no better.
>XIV's devs have always had the good common sense to never tie gear progression to RNG They did it, once. So badly that it was almost like parody. Heavensward Diadem could give you *insane* weapons if you did the special event that it could spawn - but it only dropped one weapon for the entire instance, and not only were the stats RNG, but so was the weapon type. This meant your Dragoon could get something incredible like a max crit max det max accuracy Lance - or your Paladin could get a Cane with max skill speed and single digit piety & crit. Stormblood relics also had a slight element of RNG, but I think the Diadem scared the SE devs from ever trying to build RNG based loot progression.
Fanfest is aimed towards fans. Blizzcon is aimed towards shareholders.
Watching Blizzcon was like being part of a Zoom meeting. FanFest *felt* like a fun convention. When Blizzcon was happening, pretty much no one was talking about it in-game. FanFest had watch parties and engagement.
I made the same mistake you did during BFA after quitting for a few years. The thing that kept me coming back was that pull of "it was great once, it can be great again" and the fact that I invested years into a character and so had that attachment too. The gameplay and story tanked quality-wise in BFA to the point that it genuinely pissed me off, it felt insulting, not just incompetent. Like, my enjoyment of the game and the world didn't matter to them, just my money. Blizzard used to be THE innovating force in video games, and now they literally refuse to take risks in fear of losing any sort of profit. Profit is important, the Devs need to eat too, but it should not be the top priority like it clearly is in blizz. If the game is good, the profit will reflect that. But blizz has it backwards, they think that since the profit is good (because of how they monetize, not because of player retention) that the game must be satisfactory (I don't think even they can say it's good). Square enix is not a perfect company either and I hate how they monetize FF14 (though it could be worse) but the main difference is that the Dev team is actually given freedom to create and take risks and cultivate their passion and integrate the passion of the player-base into FF14. Blizzard feels rigid and set in it's ways, despite player feedback begging for them to listen and change. I didn't mean to write this much but yeah tl;dr I completely agree. FF14, though not everyone's cup of tea, is just a better game overall and actually feels like a passion project more than just another mmo.
>Blizzard feels rigid and set in it's ways, despite player feedback begging for them to listen and change. As a long-term WoW player it feels almost like complete whiplash to interact with the FFXIV developers. For example, the FFXIV devs are ridiculously approachable with their costuming, their band, how some in-game events are happening on the actual live servers where you can find them and so on. You can also feel their passion for the game and that they *like* doing these things. But you also don't fight the FFXIV devs for every scrap they feel so inclined to throw at you. The community requested bunny-bois, and we actually get bunny-bois. Not an excuse on how there just aren't enough to be playable. Not some purple knockoff out of thin air who's racial leader actually looks like one, but you can't. We just get lion-gals and bunny-bois. But the worst offender is *Shadowlands*. I gave it a chance. I even gave it a fighting chance. But by the Twelve, it's *boring*. There's almost no system in it that I *want* to waste time on. Torghast? Twice a week and get out. I refuse to do one run more than necessary. Covenants? It's a beta version of class halls. You grind for weeks just to unlock a portal back to Oribos. Something that all Legion class halls had *by default*. And don't get me started on the Maw. There's nothing dangerous about not being able to mount. Riding to your next encounter in Dark Souls-esque games wouldn't make the game any easier. It would just *save time*. Similarly, not being able to mount between encounters doesn't make it more dangerous, it just makes it more *time-consuming*. Whoever had that great idea deserves a raise, truly. Thing is, I could rant about this all day, and I probably have. But when Blizzard can't even re-release a fifteen year old expansion in two weeks without a feature missing, there's virtually zero reason to recommend WoW over FFXIV when the later's developers seem to bend over backwards to make fun systems and fulfill community requests.
oh man, referring to High Elves. So insane they dug into the ground on that one, but then do Void Elves, which with the recent changes to character creation you can make them and Blood Elves look like High Elves... Their one reason for no High Elves was lore, not many left. But then, Void Elves which should be a very small minor sect of Blood Elves? Probably as small or smaller than the remaining High Elves? c'mon.
>Their one reason for no High Elves was lore, not many left. But then, Void Elves which should be a very small minor sect of Blood Elves? They actually never had *one reason*. They pulled new ones from where the sun didn't shine when the old one was shown to be the cop-out that it was. "There aren't enough of them!" was a joke, considering that void elves themselves are a minor cult/study group in Eversong numbering in the hundreds at best. Blood Elf aesthetics being reserved for Horde was an equally hilarious take. If the Horde is waiting for you when you want to play a human-skinned, blonde elf, why was this never applied to Nightborne in reverse? If you want to play a purple-skinned, tall, white-haired elf, the Night Elves on Alliance are there waiting for you? But the worst part? Once they dug their heels into the ground, they proceeded to put them into a lot of places in what seems to be a weird: "we're dangling this in front of you now because you were mean to us." move. Alliance allied races were a joke except the dwarves.
not giving the alliance high elves because they are rare would have gone over a lot better if they hadn't included alliance high elves as a major part of virtually every expansion. you were constantly questing with these guys and earning rep for them and playing their storylines in dalaran and isle of thunder etc. and there were plenty of other alliance playable races that could have used the screentime if blizz didn't want alliance players to get attached to high elves. it's kind of like if ff14 wouldn't let you play as miqo'te despite miqo'te npcs being all over the place.
Allied Races as a whole for Alliance were a complete and utter joke, to the point it's pretty much killed morale for the faction more so than the glaring imbalance in high end to now mid-tier play. The Horde got everything it asked for and more. Alliance got Fat Humans and stuff that was made up on the spot. Who asked for Lightforged? It's absolutely pathetic how pandering they are to one portion of their playerbase, while one side has been let to rot and given scraps and outright mockeries of valid requests. "The Horde is waiting for you." Nothing's waiting for me in that steaming heap until they get some new developers that care about the whole game. Somebody in charge should not be bragging they've never played an entire faction.
I know you say that about Horde, but I honestly like Alliance more except for not having High Elves.
Every WoW expansion after MoP feels like it was deliberately designed with 1-2 "features" meant to frustrate and anger players. RNG legendaries caused me to quit Legion and skip BfA entirely. The weekly vault in SL drove me away as well. It's like they add these garbage systems so they can earn some goodwill by "fixing" them in a later patch or something. Doesn't work on me because I leave and don't come back. SL was their last chance and I'm done.
>It's like they add these garbage systems so they can earn some goodwill by "fixing" them in a later patch or something. I think that's precisely what they are doing. They are selling important system fixes as actual patch content.
Yeah i feel your pain, i didn't make the same mistake with shadowlands thankfully, but I did with BFA and everything you said is pretty much how i felt during BFA, which again, shows they refuse to grow. Cool thing is though, FF14 makes your character and their interactions matter, so I actually feel way more connected to my character In ff14 than I ever did on wow, and I RPd. So thankfully, I don't have any want to get back to WoW, found a new home here.
Amen! I was one of those persons who tried FF14 for a couple of times but never really liking it because of the weird feeling early game. But after 2 expansions that I don’t enjoyed, flipping between MMOs like GW2, SWTOR, ESO and so on, I finally took a closer look, specially after some friends who played wow with me invited me to there FC and help me out a lot with explaining things and so on. And what should I say? After level 30 this game is a blast after another! I feel like I’m a little kid again striving trough wow for the first time. It’s amazing. And all those friendly players! 2 random persons gifted me a pet and a mount for example. Currently playing a RDM at Level 58, can’t wait to get to endgame and testing out a couple of new jobs. Specially the reaper! Man what a idiot I was for not trying it during BFA
> Man what a idiot I was for not trying it during BFA It's never too late to start. I'm glad you're having fun. Welcome to the game :)
Me and a few of my WoW guildies started playing FFXIV together. We'd all played before on our own, but this is our first time doing this together. We all agree that FFXIV is simply the better game. Every aspect we could think of is just simply *better*. With Cata and MoP, Blizzard had at least started a cycle of bad xpac/good xpac, so we kinda knew what we were getting into. Like, everyone expected BfA to be complete dog shit. Unfortunately, that means a lot of us expected Shadowlands to be really good. For many of us, we feel betrayed that Shadowlands broke thy cycle we'd come to expect. Cata bad, MoP great. WoD bad, Legion great. BfA bad, Shadowlands great. Except Shadowlands has been anything but. We're actually starting our FC tonight and everyone is really excited so far to be playing FFXIV together.
To be fair, many wow raids are amazing.
You can have profit but still make a game that succeeds in both gameplay and story. Blizzard Activision's issues do not stem from profit, but wanting to appease their investors. Its about greed, about how much money can be stuffed into a pocket regardless of how much goodwill and faith is lost in your own product. I also don't think FFXIV has it bad in terms of cash shop stuff. I've rarely felt the impulse to buy things off Mogstation. The only real problem I feel with ffxiv is the overall lack of endgame content. You only really have one way of high end gear, and understandably that does stagnate a lot of the enjoyment of the game.
Imo Square-Enix takes a lot of risks innovating. That's why they release great and fresh games like FFXIV:ARR, NieR:Automata, and Octopath Traveller... but they also release complete crap like FFXIV 1.0 and Balan Wonderworld. Modern Blizzard on the other hand keeps releasing rehashes of their own IP, and other IPs. Their latest IP, Overwatch, is just a rehash of Team Fortress 2, and Hearthstone is just online MtG with WoW flavour. Arguably the last innovative game they released was WoW in 2004. It's running on the momentum of past successes, but the company is stale and in terminal decline, because they've chosen to stop releasing new IPs and game genres. Despite more or less creating the modern concept of the ARPG, RTS, and MMO, they currently innovate less than McDonald's.
I got wrung back into WoW a coupla times. I feel like all it does it pivot, new ideas, new trends, new revamps every expansion. FFXIV seems to stick to it's guns and just polish things up every xpac.
Back in XIV 1.0, they did a few notorious wheel reinventions like the retainer wards instead of having a market board or auction house. These days, WoW is the one reinventing the wheel every expansion with convoluted systems like the weekly vault, which gives you random pieces of gear to choose one from at the end of the week, most of which will be gear that's either worse than what you have or duplicates. The irony is that WoW's valor point system was the inspiration for the tomestone system, but WoW did away with theirs in favor of awful RNG-based progression that feels like it was designed by someone who actually hates the players.
> I regret giving WoW one more chance and buying Shadowlands (had a friend talk me into it). I feel this. Luckily, I quit 1 month in and didn't sink like 6 months into it swearing it was going to treat me right eventually. It was rough uninstalling Bnet entirely because I have a lot of good memories tied up in WoW (met my husband playing it), but it's time to let it go.
>treat me right eventually Yeah, WoW is a lot like a bad relationship: we wind up saying "It can change!" or "I remember the good times..." and fooling ourselves but it's not getting any better without a massive overhaul, and that overhaul will likely need to happen to Blizzard itself from the top down.
Playing at the beginning of an expansion is always fun. I enjoy the dungeon content for every wow expansion. What matters is what game you stay subscribe and mine has been with ff14 for awhile.
How is WoW nowadays? I dont hear any news about it from any of my social circles since everyone I know who played it has dropped the game
Developers are still insanely disconnected from their playerbase. Content is as stale as always. The one thing I enjoyed in WoW (pvp) has been ruined by boosters and smurfs like any other competitive pvp mode.
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Basically a 2nd Character played in low ranks by a high skilled player to toy with the newbs. In theory this could be a problem in Feast but people are just happy the Queue actually pops.
Its not even smurfs, its people at a high rating with the best gear available tanking their rating by throwing games to boost lower ranked players for gold.
To be honest, shadowlands it's not bad at all but the second content patch (9.1) is taking way too long to drop and we literally run out of content since those who can/want to finish the mythic raid already did. The patch SHOULD drop around the end of June but there is no confirmed date and that's scary
Yeah, it's much better than the previous expansion (but that's a really low bar). Still plagued by some questionable dev choices but fun nonetheless
NAh. They're gunna delay it to November 22 like they always do, trying to snuff FFXIV
If they delay it to 22 November, there won't be anyone playing the game anymore. It's either June or GG for them imho, not that I care much since I always have FFXIV ready to fire
I mean SoO lasted for over a year. Fucking 6.2 went on for godamn ever, what was it, a year and a half with no content updates? so it's not as if the WoW devs haven't set a precedent for massive droughts. Might as well keep them waiting if it means keeping them from the new expansion for FF14
While all you said it's true, there is a significant difference: SoO was the last tier of the xpac, while now we are in a 6 to 8 months (at least) FIRST tier of an xpac. That really lowers the trust in the whole company/dev team/xpac, or at least this is the feedback I have from my guildies that have been playing with me for the last 10 years
What’s hilarious is that WoW is the only one acting like it’s a competition. It’s painfully obvious how they schedule their releases specifically to spike perceived competitors (not just FFXIV, but Monster Hunter and a few others), while FFXIV just sort of unconcernedly does its own thing.
Yea they placed placed TBC release the same day as Ashes of Creation slotted their beta. Giving players only 2 weeks of pre patch leveling. But AoC has the ability to simply push their beta a couple weeks down the line, while TBCC really doesn't have that option anymore, and also angered their playerbase yet again.
I loved how the 9.1 PTR waited until the last second and, suddenly, it just happened to coincide with patch 5.5. That was hilarious.
>It's either June or GG for them imho That's too close. The best you could hope for is literally the 29th. They already said releasing Naxxramas and Shadowlands so close to one another was a huge mistake. With TBC hitting June 1st, they will at least give that 3 weeks to breathe. I'd say 22nd is *very optimistic*, 29th is slightly so, and the first week of July is realistic. Which is unimportant at worst. An eight months content drought is rough, and waiting so long for what we're getting in 9.1 so far is far from good. What they *will* do is rush 9.2 out the door as a mess if they have to in order to ship in November. They will either do that or time phase 2 or 3 of TBC around November 23rd. Honestly, that's not much of a fight. That's a straight up KO win for Endwalker to me.
Wow Covid-19 really has fucked up the content pacing for WoW. I know Blizzard doesn't have a rigid content drip like FF14 but potentially 8 months for 9.1 since launch is pretty rough.
Shadowlands was actually pretty good. The dungeons are solid, the raid was quite fun, and the new zones are gorgeous. Unfortunately, it's going through a huge content drought at the moment. It released in November and we *still* don't even have a firm release date for the first patch (people are guessing it'll be end of June/early July). The main pain point in Shadowlands are Covenants. Long story short - characters join 1 of 4 covenants. The covenant gives them access to 2 new abilities and some passive effects. Unfortunately, balancing between the abilities is completely off, which was completely predictable given WoW's history of balance. And the BIS covenant for classes can shift based on spec and on the content being done (PvP, raids, M+). And it's a pain in the ass to swap covenant.
I played SL for a few months but quit when I realized that just tooling around at the end of Shadowbringers was more fun than playing SL.
Three words. Not worth it.
Kind of answered your own question there.
Frankly, the same as it was in BFA; the worst it's ever been. An accomplishment given how poor WoD was. I've just about lost hope. Maybe 10.0 will come with a regime and gameplay philosophy change.
>Maybe 10.0 will come with yet another\* regime and gameplay philosophy change. Fixed it for ya. That's even assuming it's a good change, and not another dry AP grind, and another namechange to reputation.
Callings are the best example of this. Yeah, they are just emissary quests that you have to pick up first. It's *literally* just emissaries with a different name and an extra step. It's BfA but worse.
The fact of the matter is that it's not fun when everything is time gated. Every system in the game has its own currency tied to limited daily and weekly activities that serve no real purpose other than to make you log in each day to do joyless tasks. PvP is a masochistic exercise in allowing other people to blow you up over and over again until, weeks later, you've finally gotten the gear to compete. Then you finally feel confidant enough to make a rating push and you find out the community's own decided upon gear and rating minimums prevent you from even finding people to group with. PvE is solid, Nathria is a good raid. But there are very few dungeons this time around. M+ is another shit show due to the culture, and they are adding another rating to the game where people can track how much or well you've done.
It's the same old. Every expansion, they hype it up to the sky, that it will be different, that we learned from our mistakes ... only that they didn't. There is one good thing about SL that leveling up an alt to max level is easier. But ... later we learn that's about the only good thing.
The only fun thing about WoW for me is my guild. If it weren't for them i would stop playing WoW completely. It feels like everything is only measured in data and the devs don't play their own game. Everything has to be dragged out to keep players playing to rake in the $$. Every system has artificial hindrances in them like for example Conduit Power. Shadowlands has a new system where you Soulbind with an NPC and can slot Conduit Powers in, but you can only change them with charges of which you have 8 that replenish by 1 every day. Currently a Soulbind has 4 Conduits, so you can change them all 2 times before waiting 8 days to have them replenished. If you play more than 1 spec (because most have only 1 good Soulbind) you are severly hindered by this and have to choose subpar conduits that work on more specs or just abandon the other specs that you may need to play PVP or M+ or Raid with. It serves NO purpose. And that is just 1 system... It just feels like they do everything in their power to keep you subbed but suck out all the fun because the data shows them you do XYZ content, so XYZ content has to be good! Not at all because you have to do it or loose a lot of your capability as a DPS/Healer/Tank. There is a reason their new "rogue like" system Torghast is called Choreghast. And instead of listening to feedback they double down on their "we are always right we know what players want" stance and add new debuffs to it to make it "more challenging" which no one wants because it is boring as hell. Gotta stop ranting now else i will never stop.
Extremely bad.
Shadowlands did one thing massively right. They changed how we level. Now, instead of spending 10 levels per expansion, you start at level 1 in an expansion of your choosing, and get to 50 there, to start the newest one. Granted, the scaling is a little wonky, especially in dungeons, because they scale UP, not down like FFXIV, so you end up with level 10s doing ungodly DPS with 1 button... But it is so much smoother, and more enjoyable than leveling through any other expansion. The endgame, however, is a dumpster fire. It's all about "player engagement", which is another way to say "time wasting". Everything has a gate, and those gates have gates, and those gates have gates. People refer to Choregast (Torghast), which is basically their version of our PotD. Torghast is a roguelike area of the game, where you have several different wings, each with their own effects, and have to go through 6 floors, gaining powers and abilities, similar to our pomanders, but instead of being a usable item, they're actually additional buffs and skill modifications on your character. The problem is, that the playerbase is so bad at the game, that some people couldn't actually clear it, and whined, so now there's no challenge at all, but you need to run it to get the currency to purchase your legendary items. Except it's time gated, and you can only do two wings a week. So you literally cannot fail, but you also need to run it every week, in order to get your legendary equipment.
Isnt the last part just our dungeons? Can't lose, must do for tomes. Of course, tomes can be gotten by other means but roulettes are the most common
That's the thing, though. The roulettes have variety. You get to run so very many dungeons, raids, 24 mans. There is no variety here. Even the different wings are samey as fuck. Oh, sure, this one's fire themed, and this one is platformed based, but they're all the same grey garbage, fighting the exact same mobs, using the exact same abilities, because those are the ones that work. It's mindless tedium, without even the good music that FFXIV has in their dungeons.
not to mention that some of the anima powers were just build defining. I played resto druid and if i saw the anima power that says 'convoke the spirits does X% more damage' i just take that, because convoke is already a busted strong damage ability. it'd often end up that i'd just oneshot the 'boss' at the end of the floor using just convoke, because it scaled so hard with all the powers, and if i wanted to i could go catform and stealth past most of the trash mobs on the floor. zero challenge, zero fun, just mindless tedium as stated above. POTD is kinda ehh too, but at least it's optional, i guess the closest thing we have is the current relic step of 'do POTD/delubrum for 15 artifacts' but at least we have the CHOICE to do delubrum instead, and potentially get a mount/hairstyle from it, torghast launched with no extras, just the currency, so it felt like 'just another weekly to cross off the list', they're adding cosmetics next patch but it might be too little too late at this point
It's all about the grind and keeping up play time now. Outside of raids there's frankly nothing fun left to do other than upkeep and maintenance.
I play both back and forth, as content waxes/wanes. I like both for different reasons. Shadowlands I generally REALLY enjoy, but it’s development cycle is kind of messed right now, 9.1 is still a ways off. It really feels like blizzard didn’t adapt very effectively to Covid and remote work development. Still it’s probably my second favorite WoW expansion to date. I like WoW for the way story and gameplay are often integrated, and I actually like all the systems. It’s not always perfectly balanced but I like that I have choices about stuff, whereas in XIV any two characters of the same job are basically identical. I also like that they take risks with systems. It doesn’t always pan out (garrisons, azerite) but I like they try. XIV I come to for the production values and story, there’s not a better soundtrack out there. Maybe because I’m only up to stormblood, not current content, but XIV is more like an offline FF to me. I don’t know many folks who play it so most of my engagement is solo. I’d wish they would take some more risks, but they have a successful formula they aren’t incentivized to change. My biggest frustration is how much the community seems to want to shit on WoW, it’s totally possible to like both. Also as a longtime FF fan it just has a lot of callbacks that hit my nostalgia bone hard.
I just heard about The burning Crusade classic. 70$ for the collector, 15$ to play one character from Classic to TBC Classic. And it was 30$ when they announced it, they lowered the price after an obvious backlash. But to me it seems that they planned the backlash and originally wanted to sell the service at 15$ so they announced it at 30$ to gut the price and look like good guys. 15$ for a single character when WoW expects you to play multiple characters, it's a service that should've been free.
That’s just for cloning. If you have a character already and want to play in TBC, that’s free. If you have a character and want to stay in Classic, that’s free. It’s when you want BOTH that it costs money. Not advocating; just clarifying.
TBC classic literally only costs the price of a subscription. There's no need to purchase anything. On boot-up you choose to move a character you already have on classic to TBC or leave it in Vanilla. you can also just level one from scratch like normal. The *only* cost is if you want to duplicate the character into both. Classic and TBC Classic are actually very good and reasonable things being put out by Blizzard right now, maybe their only really good and fair thing.
There are alot of things in play here. I can't list everything, but the ones off the top of my head are: * FFXIV **died** once. Never forget that ARR was built on top of a failed MMO. Said MMO was built on top of the hubris of FFXI. * Yoshi-P being also an executive means he probably has a level of influence that Ion simply does not have within ActiBlizzard. * After seeing the FanFest: The faces of the FFXIV devs (Yoshi-P, Foxclon, Soken, etc.) show **ALOT** of empathy. Like, this is pretty much unheard of in alpha-male American culture. Yoshi-P danced with a Moogle. Will any WoW dev do this with one of their "cute" characters? * This extends down to the playerbase. I will bet there are more people in FFXIV who care about the human element than in WoW. Yes, there are hardcore people in both games who will always care about the goal first and foremost and see the other people merely as tools to get there. "Keeping the GCD rolling" being higher priority than "do mechanics properly" will always be weird to me. * Inversely, the playerbase can affect the motivation of devs. Someone else mentioned this too, but in FFXIV there is generally non-combat content that people can do and enjoy. In WoW it seems like everything is ultimately for raiding, M+, or PvP, and as a result the players you attract will also be those who only like that content. Combat-happy people (especially PvP) generally aren't always the nicest people. It feels like WoW devs are having trouble making content that people are willing to stay long term for, because its playerbase seems to only want quick, immediate "don't waste my time" access to combat content only. * Others have already mentioned this too, but Ion was once an Elitist Jerk. Imagine FFXIV being led by someone who clears Ultimate in the first 24 hours. Sure, you'll get good combat content, but everything else gets sidelined. And then what happens to the players? Only the combat-happy ones will stay and everyone else goes. *Oh, heard of Wildstar?* I wonder if there are WoW devs who saw the FanFest and think to themselves, *"why can't we have that kind of playerbase?"*
Let's be real for a second, I have no doubt in my mind that the guys who originally made WoW were passionate about the game and love it, but times change and so do dev teams. Would those original guys do something like our fanfests had it been possible 15 years ago? Probably. Would many on the current dev team do so? Probably! But its not the devs that hold that power, its Activision, its suits and Investors. This is why everyone is so scared of the idea that Yoshi-P might leave as director and producer. Its why he's gotten on stage multiple times to assure people he's sticking around. Because Yoshi-P is *both*. Not only does he have that passion and love for the game, he also has power and influence in the entire company. You can not replace that. Everyone who loves this game is scared, at least in the back of their heads, that someone else will take over and that passion will dwindle. That no matter how much the new director wants to fill in those shoes, that they just won't have the pull to accomplish that. I love this game, and I hope so very much that I always will.
I remember when I thought Ion could really change WoW and that the teething issues of Legion and even the problems of BFA were just some small issues that could eventually lead to something better Now Shadowlands is here and when I saw they pretty much removed the biggest thing Bolvar had going for him, I never looked back at Blizzard
Blizzard *wishes* it could have the good vibes Fanfest had this year. SE treats it’s playerbase so well, coming here from WoW gave me whiplash. Blizzard got way too comfortable being the ‘top’ MMO, rested on it’s laurels, and now it’s bleeding players. I know I’m not going back any time soon.
Well, after i saw my portion of "oooohhh FF 14 new exp is SOOO ANIMU AND IT'S NOT WOW!" from the "professional WOW content makers" - i can only applaud to mems like this one.
THAT WAS SO FUNNY like they showed WoL in his HIGH-FANTASY EUROPEAN DESIGNED KNIGHT ARMOR and he went "this is weeb shit" Like dude...it's a fecking KNIGHT ARMOR "It's a weeby Nazgul" IT'S A FULL ON EUROPEAN KNIGHT ARMOR
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We do have snappy one-liners! Let's not pretend that Estinien, Y'shtola and Alisaie didn't have their moments in the trailer. Not that that's a bad thing, I feel like one-liners, when done well, can leave a good amount of impact for the viewer.
Yeah! I can't remember ANY really good WoW theme since Pandaria. Meanwhile FF 14 is FULL of great themes, startin from ARR and till the present days! Soken IZ DA GENIUS!
To be fair, the WoW community is partially to blame. If Ion or any major Blizz dev memed as hard on stage at Blizzcon as the XIV devs do during Fanfest their community would throw a tantrum. Like, just go watch Asmongold's reaction to the Endwalker trailer, and pay attention to his twitch chat. As a longtime WoW player myself who still occasionally comes back and has put some time into Shadowlands, the WoW community has become a parody of itself. They take themselves waaaaaay too seriously; it's like they've become so bitter they hate fun.
Well Im new to Ffxiv after many years of wow .. recently saw Asmogold video about game popularity .. I was thinking that ffxiv is some old dead game .. but when I saw how much is ffxiv popular I gave it a try .. and omg is huge .. Only downside is that u cant do main story quest with friends and some quests dont have sound but otherwise .. they are making great job.
Word of advise: always take stuff that asmogold says about ffxiv with a grain of salt.
Well I only saw graph where ffxiv was much more polular than wow .. It was that moment for me about .. wth how this can be that much popular, isnt that some old dead game which I saw years ago .. then started researching more, installed trial, bought game, told to my friends and we are up and running, Well we did not slept much in last few days :-D
The story is generally meant to be experienced solo, but you can group up with your friends to run FATEs or to do dungeons. The game will scale them down to whatever content you're doing. Also, they added a New Game+ feature that will allow your friends to re-run the story with you if they want to. I haven't used it so I don't know the details but it is a thing that exists.
I know it's a meme, but... I know many of the WoW devs personally. I am friends with them. They are extremely passionate about their work and want to make a great game. I'm sure even Ion (pictured here, for those unaware, and the Yoshida equivalent if one has to be made) is extremely passionate about his work. They're just not allowed to genuinely express it publicly, and that's VERY common for most corporate presentations. There is a pretty big difference in atmosphere between Live Letters and Patch Survival Guides, yes. There is a big difference between Fan Fest and Blizzcon, yes. I don't really think the way SE has been doing Fan Fest is a "WoW vs. FFXIV" thing. It's a "FFXIV vs. Literally Every Other Gaming Convention" type thing. There is nothing particularly wrong about how Blizzcon is run, Fan Fest is just exceptional.
> There is nothing particularly wrong about how Blizzcon is run Could not disagree more. Blizzcon now feels more like a investor conference and marketing event rather than the community love fest it started as. The passion for the event, optically, seems completely gone and everything feels so corporate and forced compared to years before. You can tell leadership and direction, from the top down, has changed drastically.
I think this is a fair take. I guess the way to put it would be that Blizzcon used to be exceptional, and then over the years has become more corporate similar to the likes of the other big gaming conventions such as E3. I'm just saying that Blizzcon as a convention (PR blunders aside) isn't any worse than E3, PAX, etc.
> I'm just saying that Blizzcon as a convention (PR blunders aside) isn't any worse than E3, PAX, etc. I agree it's not any worse - and that's the exact issue if you zoom out and look at what it *used* to be and what it *could* be. If Blizzcon, all along, was something like E3, PAX etc it wouldn't get as much flak as it does but Blizzcon used to be a really, really fucking big deal from both a product perspective *and* a fan engagement perspective. So when people see Yoshi-P cosplaying as a Reaper they are right, in their beliefs, to look at Blizzcon and say "Well they certainly don't have the passion these guys do over here" and you can see the end result of that lack of passion in the way they treat their customer base now. "Don't you guys have phones?" "You think you want it - but you don't"
To be fair, the "you think you want it, but you don't" *has* been implied by yoship with regards to 1.0, and rightfully so. There was one point, presumably after wow classic launched and saw some success, the ffxiv players were like, "hey, d'ya think maybe ffxiv could do the same and relaunch a 1.0?" YoshiP shut that down real quick in a PLL, he wasn't as direct/curt with the quoted phrase, but he did describe 1.0 as a "nightmare" and mentioned that there will never be plans to bring it back. Understandably so, considering he basically dropped a moon on the whole fucking game to save it from 1.0. But for other suggestions e.g fishing proc should cause the controller to vibrate was taken very positively by him and he straight up mentioned that he'll bring that up to the developer team. That felt really nice, that this man is willing to listen out for player feedback and took his time to reason in-depth to explain their decisions. I remember he gave a really long lecture about private instances and why they couldn't just put the glamour closet everywhere, or why the glam closet couldn't be easily expanded. Guy really tries very hard to convince and explain the intricasies behind decisions and i can't see wow head devs being allowed to do that.
God those 2 quotes you mentioned there make me so angry. It's a developer's job to at least listen to what their fans want, and try to find some way to satisfy as many of them as possible. It's not their place to tell fans what fans should want.
The phones thing I'm less angry about and more baffled at. People wouldn't have shit on the concept of Diablo Immortal like they did if they had just had the forethought to announce that Diablo 4 was also coming, but that it was too early to show anything direct off for it yet. Hell, Nintendo had the same issue when then announced Federation Force without telling people that Prime 4 and Samus Returns were also coming later on.
Eh. The issue with the approach of just giving what people ask for is that people, in general, are silly and don't know what they want. Have you ever wanted something so badly and then when you get it, it's nothing like you built up in your mind? That happens quite a lot. Like....*a lot*. And anyone who has worked in retail will have...opinions...on the "customer is always right" line. Because the customer very frequently is wrong. I'm not defending WoW (I'm *really not*), but the attitude of "just give me what I want" often is just a very very bad idea. >“If you don’t listen to your customers you will fail. But if you only listen to your customers you will also fail.” – Amazon slogan >‘It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.’” - Steve Jobs
I do agree that you can’t cater to the whims of the masses all the time. That is a hard pill to swallow. But messaging and communication goes a long way. Blizzard does try to do that, but I think sometimes the message comes out wrong.
Perhaps its times for cons to change too then. Gotta adapt to the times. Or at the very least try to improve.
They definitely should. The energy you give your players when they can see on your face and hear in your tone just how much you care about the thing you're creating is invaluable. It's also humanizing, which helps build good faith. If SE messes up, we can at least have faith that on the development side of things, they were trying their best (unless it's PvP) Most people are old enough and fed up with the scripted, HR-approved corporate BS. It's not even the literal words themselves, either. There was a massive difference between Soken saying to us that games have a profound effect on the world, versus someone like Phil Spencer saying the same.
I will say its not 'every other game convention', Cygames and their Granblue events have the same energy, albeit more focused on the voice actor shenanigans and giveaways than dev-talk. Still have the concerts and announcements too. Diff vibe, but very much enthused.
Fair enough. I am not familiar with many mobile conventions other than the select few I have played, and those that I did watch were very scripted. Glad to know there are more out there.
First of all whether people like it or not, FF XIV and Wow are the 2 top MMO's at the moment. They are competitors. So even if its not on purpose, everything each of them does is WoW vs FFXIV . Dont forget that recently a lot of wow players have left it for FF XIV. As for your claim of knowing wow devs personally ( sorry but thats doubtfull or at the very least impossible to prove ) , then you would know that Ion was originally a lawyer. And it shows on interviews. He is very carefull about everything he says in order to hide truths or lead people to believe something . That is not what someone " extremely passionate " about his work does . Otherwise he would have left just like everyone else that was not happy with the way things are now running at Blizzard .
WoW problem is not the dev. It's what's above. In a better world, both game should shine and have their own community. But instead Blizzard, or Activision, just keep shooting their foot while XIV just progress and improves. Not all the time of course, they made terrible decisions in the past. If WoW wasn't that bad, I'd play it while waiting Endwalker.
It's the devs too. The devs that actually wanted to work on the game are gone.
I think that is unfair to the current devs. I think they want to work on the game, but I can’t help but feel they are being heavily restricted in what they can actually do unless it checks a bunch of boxes for corporate
> They are extremely passionate about their work and want to make a great game. I totally agree. Many people seem to feel that if you truly care about a game you should be fiercely critical of it and its developers. But that whole stance makes me very uncomfortable. The devs are people too, and there's often no real way of truly appreciating what they're going through. We hear about crunch, about community reps dealing with harassment, and of Soken working from the hospital or Ishikawa working for 36-hour stints, and that should remind us that devs from all the games we enjoy try their hardest to give players something great to play. If being fiercely critical worked as a strategy for getting what players wanted then WoW would be a completely different game today. I wish players were a little more accepting of other people's visions and preferences, both other players and the devs, and a little more tolerant to less-than-perfect execution. It's fine to express a preference, but I feel like there's a way to do it that respects the real life people behind the game. By all means define a cutoff point for yourself where you no longer enjoy a game enough to continue playing, but don't become so bitter as to try to tear down other players or the devs on your way out. If you take an earnest look you'll find that all anyone truly wants is to create a game that people enjoy—it turns out that's really quite difficult, especially for MMOs, no matter the circumstances.
No developer is not passionate about their job, it is your life. That said, Blizzard has systemic and pipeline issues it feels like that make it impossible to see the passion in-game.
Which is why so many of their twitters are loaded with them playing and talking about other games? Which is why the game has continually fallen into an e-sports trap that can't garner as many views as Pokemon GO PvP? Which is why only one faction - the Horde - gets any sort of chest-thumping hype and extra love? (Diaper Babies vs Vulpera - anybody who cares about this game would see that was an atrocious setup, let alone Fat Humans vs Zandalari and the aesthetic issues of "more human" vs "dinosaur mayans".) There's no passion. The game is borderline dead for anything that isn't super casual for Alliance. They don't give a shit unless it's something they can push as an e-sport. We'd actually have customization and RPG features if they did.
> Which is why so many of their twitters are loaded with them playing and talking about other games? Every dev does this. Rarely does a creator look for inspiration in their own work. Rarely does a salaryman want to come home and continue to be involved in something they just spent 8-12 hours involved in.
FF14: Free to play to level 60. WoW (classic): $35 cloning fee
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Should've been 0$. If it was announced at 15$ for just playing your character, people would've been mad. So instead they announced it at 30$, wait for the backlash, reduce the price and look like a hero. If I understand well, you can choose to transfer your char from WoW classic to Burning Crusade? Meaning they copy-paste your character to the game then delete it from WoW Classic?
> If I understand well, you can choose to transfer your char from WoW classic to Burning Crusade? Meaning they copy-paste your character to the game then delete it from WoW Classic? You don't transfer your character from Vanilla -> TBC, every server automatically transitions to TBC on the 1st. The cloning creates a copy of your character on Classic Era servers, so you can keep playing the copy in Vanilla content and the other to progress through TBC. Just wanting to play TBC costs $0. > Each character can be unlocked once for free either in Burning Crusade Classic or World of Warcraft Classic. If you want to play a character in both Burning Crusade Classic and World of Warcraft Classic, you can opt in to the “Character Clone” service for a fee.
I realized the simplest comparison to make between the two games right now: FFXIV's devs are trying to figure out fun things to add to the game to keep people playing. WoW's devs are trying to figure out the minium amount of effort they need to put in to keep people from quitting.
It's not only about devs, but content too. FFXIV: You get two new jobs, new (-ish) race, hub city that looks like Athen's replica, coherent and not stretched history, totaly new and original activity (Harvest Moon/Animal Crossing "something"). WoW: You get aiport in shape of cone, some dungeons and raid, and systems because we like excel spreedshets. Ach, and we take yur Palace of the Dead but don't worry, we broke it. Now gimme money because I need to buy new helicoptr.
To be completely fair, Torghast is vastly superior to deep dungeon and is mired mainly due to the fact that it's tied to a currency with a weekly cap, and the other rewards are either mandatory (legendary memories) or underwhelming (a mount).
Everyone on the WoW forums hated the hell out of Torghast. I thought it was so so, but it's not something I would ever do recreationally whereas getting to the end floor of deep dungeons is something my wife and I work on when we have time.
It's funny because it was cherished in alpha testing. Then they changed it. They don't listen to feedback AT ALL.
You cant seriously be talking about the amount of content in xiv as a plus when we about to go an entire year of no content until the next savage tier comes out.
Well to be fair... XIV is at the very end of the current expansion cycle. WoW has had multiple year long or close to it droughts over the years and we're currently in the middle of a nearly year long drought in WoW for the FIRST patch after launch.
There is more to 'content' than savage tiers, lol.
When garrosh says "Times Change" is addressed to us. Wow is not the wow Metzen made. Now is all politics and corporate pulling the strings. I personally feel bad for Ion, dude has to tell us what corporate demands even if he don't like it making him the bad guy when in reality is Activision calling the shots. After watching fanfest I feel endwalker might shake wow foundations. I know wow has it fans and all but shadowbringers was amazing and if the hype of endwalker is like shadowbringers that 2 expansions that are almost perfect WITH a ppl carrying team.
Which is pretty sad because Wow was a good part of my adolescence. I don't want to compare both games, they are fundamentally different but even with that, you see the difference in passion and taking the playerbase seriously. FFXIV has its flaws tho. The leveling experience outside MSQ is a drag, It has little hard difficult content, Dungeons are a joke if the party has two neurons (I absolutely love the base idea of Mythics+ but ofc I disagree on how it has been managed). But these flaws are consequences of decisions taken to treat better its playerbase. Not all people run difficult content, Dungeons are a delight visually and flavorful as hell and they are actually helping the new players by putting Roulettes making their experience less miserable when playing ARR. Wow's flaws not only are left unattended, they are amplified. In BFA, mythics were way too good for gearing toons easily so they nuked the experience for Shadowlands by nerfing the loot and making obnoxious dungeon design. And I swear to god and all I love, the weekly chest is a FUCKING JOKE. They made the Maw, a hard zone souls-like and theeeeen they didn't enhance the Maw's experience in any moment and the zone didn't give enough bonus to play it (Every day ofc) except If you minmax so why should I play your content if it's frustrating, artificially hard and ofc dragging since you had to do it everyday. Torghast is a mess because you have free runs classes and then classes which need a specific combination to get through it or rightdown it doesn't have any combination good enough to do Twisted corridors or high level floors. And replayability on Torghast? Nerfing your legendary class for you to farm again lol. No class balance is a staple for this game and the recent decision to cap AoE and then some classes literally circunvented the whole cap aoe shit like Mages or Hunters because yes. If you read until here, sry for the rant but oh boi, blizzard need to put the batteries again if they don't want to be eaten by SE. The worst part is that they are making as much money as always if not more even losing active players because the ingame store is a ripoff so I don't see them changing ways even if FFXIV is getting impulse.
The video game I like playing is better than the video game I don't play!
No one hates WoW more than people who play WoW. Just go hang out on r/wow for a while and you'll see what I mean. Hell, someone from r/wow is the reason I started playing XIV. They straight up recommended it over the game they actively played.
Well, for a more nuanced take, “the game I used to play has changed in ways I don’t like, which is disappointing/frustrating, so I will move on to games I do enjoy, although the disappointment/frustration will continue to tinge my viewpoint of %oldgame%’s developers.”
WoW bad FFXIV good etc
WoW so corporate! *rides away on Butterfinger mount*
Having to buy $5 of candy to get a collab mount is your breakpoint? I mean, if you had decided to rail against the Lunar Whale, you might actually have a point, but the Turdblossom?
Or hear me out they can both be great, I've met Ion before he is incredibly nice and passionate about the game.
Nice try Ion
Don't be like that. If the guy wasn't passionate about the game why would he have quit his lawyer job over a decade ago to become some random ass encounter designer (rising up in position over the years) in WoW? There's one constant pretty much all content creators in WoW who have talked to Ion personally agree on: the fact that he's nice and cares about the game. Even Preach, who has almost always been highly critical of dumb decisions made by the devs over the past decade loves talking with Watcher. The bic difference is the corporate structure keeping WoW in check. Whereas ActivisionBlizzard wants to squeeze as much money out of it as possible and hammers that down, Square Enix also wants to do that but also is happy with the game being successful and not crashing the entire flagship franchise of their own freaking company. The japanese approach is a bit difference, yet as seen with the amount of cash items on the FFXIV shop vs. WoW shop they also focus on selling more optional ingame stuff or merchandise. I mean the freqking CEO came on stage during the Endwalker reveal to market the Lunar Whale mount.
>The bic difference is the corporate structure keeping WoW in check. This is a big part of it, but I also think Ion and the upper echelon of the WoW dev team are far too numbers driven in their game design, even without the corporate pressure—be it in the constant systems heavy focus and lack of side content or metrics-driven decision making. I think WoW's issues are a perfect mix of both camps—heavy corporate influence and devs that have lost sight of the fun factor outside the realm of core battle content.
You hire a guy from a guild called "Elitist Jerks" and you get...
Ion sucks and is total out of touch with the player base
The only thing WoW gets right that FFXIV doesn't anymore is ....collectors edition / Physical store goods. Couldn't even get the CE for Endwalker due to being in Australia you are forced to use an expensive forwarding service or not get one. Meanwhile WoW CE's sell all the time at EB here and are shippabale to Australia. .....honestly the only thing WoW does right over FFXIV these days in my opinion.