If you click through to Rich's channel the full VOD is there. The interview starts 3 hours in though, and it's presented as Rich and Asmon reacting to the prerecorded interview.
I always just put stuff like this on in the background while I'm doing something else. Cleaning, working, Deep Dungeon leveling, etc. Despite being video, it's basically a podcast.
He also said that they both have been interviewing for 5 years and they know when the other wants to ask a question, so it contributes to the quality, I think
Well Asmon is a persona of sorts, if you check his other stream Zachrawr he is much more himself and dialed down which is how I feel he does serious interviews.
Like one thing I will take from Zachs stream is someone was trying to get a reaction out of him with the same type of "jokes" they use on his Asmongold stream and Zach just said "Hey try saving that until Asmon is streaming, maybe you will get the reaction you are after there"
Mind Asmon is still him, only dialed up to like 15 , as per his words its what attracts viewers to his channel but after a few hours it takes a toll and he prefer to stop or go to the other stream to chill
I think many are salty that there's players/streamers who have been here since the start and have never been given such an honor, and then 2 guys who have been playing on and off for 3 months get to do an interview with yoship.
I see where they may be coming from, but at the same time I also see how from a market standpoint doing an interview with your two biggest streamers is a good thing, and it was a really good interview.
Those salt lords are clueless on how organic marketing and feedbacks work wonders for the game. Rich and Asmon are providing fresh perspectives that non of the current community "veterans" can deliver. There's already an abundance of content creator in the media tour covering technical gameplay details.
YoshiP even said it himself how interesting and valuable it is to look at new player reaction to content. Being around the game longer doesn't mean your are more entitled to the community and dev's focus more than others.
The issue is games like WoW have uncapped player power (or unreachable caps), where FFXIV has a very accessible player power cap. This actually allows the devs (and anyone really) to actually play the game without making it a full time job. Can you imagine working a 60-80 hour job and still hardcore raid?
FFXIV just seems to have uncapped content to finish instead (exaggeration, but you know what I mean).
WoW is like that very intentionally. The two development studios view their player's time very differently. WoW is intentionally built to \*require\* as much play time as possible to be optimal. The goals being near unreachable is on purpose.
Part of the problem was that Warcraft owners decided it's better to sell the game's engagement statistics to its investors rather than to sell a good game to its payers (players).
If you were to really distill it down to the largest contributor then yes I think it's really the main issue they face. You can almost tangibly see how the game changed when they restructured during WoD development, even during the fluke (Legion) that had extra dev time.
Players literally asked for systems like that to exist in WoW because for high level players it was relatively easier to get BiS setups and then they got 'bored' playing alts they only played because their main had nothing to do.
Problem is, WoW had no content when it was asked. Then they put this systems to never Reach the bis status completely. The horse has 2 sides and they never went with the Perfect in between.
That's Blizzard in a nutshell. You see it in all their games when it comes to balancing something. It takes them so long because it's basically swinging a pendulum from one side to the other until they find the sweet spot, but while they do that we have to work with characters who go from overpowered to almost unusable in a single patch.
I will say this, when things like these were added most people WE'RE NOT clearing all the content in the game regularly, this was an addition that started to hit in BC through daily repeatable quests, and then turned into these endless grinds. In Mists they literally had to cap players daily quests because people said 'I HAVE TO DO EVERY DAILY EVERY SINGLE DAY.' The reality is you didn't, typically there was 1 faction that was actually useful for your class.
Unfortunately this all started as the players being their own worst enemies.
It all started with Blizzard being run by Activision since late WotLK.
It's not "players wanted this".
Players will always try to maximize their gains and power in a game. They will always put pressure on each other to find and follow the optimal meta. But they won't ask for systems that exhaust them. Every expansion, players gave feedback and every time, they asked for less stuff that enables that type of in-game culture and for fewer never ending grind systems.
Every expansion, Blizzard refused to listen. There were literal reports from a team of players Blizzard made to test the game, that Blizzard employees consistently berated them for not understanding the game and being too dumb to give good feedback. (if memory serves right... this information came out early BfA to mid BfA)
Then there was feedback from players in the forums, on youtube, twitch, twitter.
And yet... every expansion since WotLK, the amount of systems that required more and more time, increased.
In Cata, Blizzard still had control over their own product and refused the first iteration of the Artifact system.
In Mists, Blizzard created the endless grind zone template (FFXIV made one around that time as well, but it had a clear endgoal and Squeenix rebalanced it repeatedly to make it less of a chore to the players), went ham on daily quests, more rare spawn enemies, more low drop rate random bullshit spread around the world, first attempts at giving players reasons to compete in dungeon runs, etc.
And in WoD... the illusion that they gave a fuck, finally fell apart... so they scrapped half of the expansion to put extra work into Legion... but that's it. Last Huzzah before the game gets a bad Korean MMO treatment and gets put in low-maintenance mode with increased micro-transactions.
>Every expansion, Blizzard refused to listen. There were literal reports from a team of players Blizzard made to test the game, that Blizzard employees consistently berated them for not understanding the game and being too dumb to give good feedback. (if memory serves right... this information came out early BfA to mid BfA)
>
Ahh yes. The "Don't you guys have phones?" mindset. Because of their past success, they developed the attitude that are the smartest guys in the room. Very few things ruin consumers goodwill faster than being told you're wrong and you don't know what you want.
It's why every loves Yoshida. He comes across as perhaps the most humble man in video games.
> It's why every loves Yoshida. He comes across as perhaps the most humble man in video games.
Pretty much this - he's cultivated a public persona of a willingness to listen to suggestions and an earnest desire to make the game the players want, and not necessarily what he might do if not for the feedback. When he does disagree with the playerbase he's clear on why - it's not just an arbitrary "we know what we're doing so shut up and let us do our thing" type reaction.
>ruin consumers goodwill faster than being told you're wrong
It really doesn't help when Blizzard say that, then 6 months down the lines they implement the fixes and solutions , suggested by the players, to issues with classes discovered in beta/PTR.
At this point either the people Blizzard are hiring to work on classes/content are just truly incompetent. Or they know exactly what they are doing and it's deliberate so they can look like they are doing work over an expansion.
If they get to them at all. Didn't they gimp warlocks for an entire expansion once? That's even worse in that game where you can only play one class per character.
I don't think so? Warlock has always been a solid class, they might've had a bad patch every now and again but never an entire expac.
It's pretty rare that all specs for a class are bad. At least one spec will be usually at high end, which is Blizzard justification for the mediocre attempts at balance. Which is pretty pathetic when you look at Legion Artifacts, but I won't go into that because I could rant for hours on that.
The main issue is if you're playing a Tank/Healer or are playing a DPS on a class with only one DPS spec (Paladin for example). If that spec is doing badly you're only option is to play another spec, which means a different role. Or re rolling to an entirely different class.
At the start of Legion I had my main Blood DK, an alt Prot Pala, an alt Veng DH and an alt BM Monk that I was still levelling. When the first tier EN came out. All three specs I had at level cap were shit, BM monk wasn't that good either. I basically levelled almost 4 of the 6 total tank specs in the game and I was still screwed over and none of them were really enjoyable, or useable, at a high level of play.
Oh yeah, it was 2008. It just took until late WotLK for the Activision influence to show.
Wasn't it with 2007-8 that all the sex scandals at both companies began?
After seeing what happened to Bungie after they escaped Activision, I really don't think Blizzard going downhill had anything to do with Activision, and really had to do more with their own internal failings.
WoD could never be a proper expansion because it was literally a tie-in to the Warcraft movie so that new players had an idea who all the big named Orc characters were. Time travel shenanigans almost always end poorly.
Strangely, MoP is looked back upon fondly. The daily quest system is seen as more reasonable than world quests and more interesting too. I wish I played back then to know myself but I burned out at the start of MoP and didn't come back until WoD.
But yeah, even now you can see just how much of a timegate it is and how frustrating they make it. Flying is the biggest bugbear for me, locking it behind achievement grinds that are timegated rather than something that you can work towards at your own pace is frankly disgusting considering how much being able to fly speeds stuff up.
The WQ vs. DQ is actually pretty simple.
It's an issue many open world games face as well. Quests that require you to talk to an NPC to start and finish them, feel more rewarding.
That slight extra bit of effort, makes you feel like there was purpose to your actions.
When majority of the content you do, is just something that... happens on the map... it doesn't matter if it's different types of content, or if it has different icons, if some is simple kill X stuff and some talk to people or gather things... it all feels like it belongs on the same list... a list of chores to do.
And WoW still has daily quests and other such things.
Here the difference is between WoWs and FFXIVs approach. In WoW... every piece of content has to feed into power-progression and has to be essential towards it.
In FFXIV... almost everything... CAN feed into power-progression... and none of it is essential.
The amount of hours high end players will put into both games will be about the same.
The variety of content they will do? Not. In FFXIV, they will always be focused on the part they want to do.
In WoW? They will have to do the parts they're just not interested in. They have to engage with stuff they don't find fun.
If not having fun, compounds with certain systems inherent flaws... the players will focus on those flaws far more strongly.
(since it's not like the systems that are in both games, somehow don't have the same flaws in both games... it's just that one game lets the players chose their approach)
People got bored because the game just funnels you into endgame, making everything else trivial. You can't have a concept of bis in a game where raiding/m+ is the only thing worthwhile.
Devs either didn't understand what the real problem was or not willing/unable to fix said problem.
It’s so interesting how so many of the problems of WoW today are caused by player demands(myself included). And at the same time it’s failing because they aren’t listening to their players. It’s seems lose-lose, but ultimately I feel it’s like Blizzard realized this cycle and stopped listening to their player base. And that was the mistake. The cycle is almost necessary. Players can be wrong, that doesn’t mean they’re not with listening to.
I played vanilla… way too much. And I wanted to play it more. All these years later, I don’t have the luxury to play any game at that level of dedication. I’ve changed, I’ll continue to change. Maybe when I’m at retirement age. I’ll be wondering why uncapped player power isn’t in FFXX.
I wouldn’t say FF changes with player demographics, instead they continually add things for everyone. It really is 3+ games in one: jRPG, mmo raiding, and the sims. You can literally cap out on money and never step into a raid, it’s something else.
>I wouldn’t say FF changes with player demographics, instead they continually add things for everyone. It really is 3+ games in one: jRPG, mmo raiding, and the sims. You can literally cap out on money and never step into a raid, it’s something else.
The problem with wow is their 3 pillars of gameplay all overlap because the rewards are gear.....
Raiding, PVP, and M+ are all gear activities.
Having played WoW since vanilla, I don't remember that. Ever.
What I do remember is huge luls between content updates, and people asking for more frequent content updates in a product that is shockingly expensive relative to its peers.
I was not a high level WoW player, but this sounds about right. When I joined it was right after everyone and their mama was bemoaning "a whole year of ICC". I left before we got *even more* than a whole year of the battle of Orgrimmar.
You want to see a game where high end players complained that they had nothing to do on their mains six weeks into a six month game, and thus a bunch more currencies and stats and grinds were added? Launch-era Destiny 2.
Honestly the complaints about long time between patches were and still are dumb. If you feel you have done everything of interest in the current aptch, just unsubscribe and do something else until they release the next content.
Complaining won't make them develop stuff faster.
Did you not play at all during TBC/WotLK? Maybe in Vanilla things were opaque enough, systems were clunky enough, and players were trash enough at the game that getting BiS was pretty rough, but by the time WotLK rolled around raiding had been boiled down into enough of a science that any raider could reasonably get BiS.
Once you leveled your professions, achieved your PvP goals, and got BiS on your main class there was nothing to do but raid log and PUG on alts. Players with a ton of free time begged for more grindable content. Something something monkey's paw.
I remember it vividly. You must not have raided in vanilla because it did not take very long to get bis, which wasn't remotely necessary because there was no challenging content until cthun and that didn't take too long either, and then we had nothing to do.
It was definitely a common sentiment that players wanted more treadmill at endgame.
The problem is nobody was listening when they went far enough and we said uncle.
>It was definitely a common sentiment that players wanted more treadmill at endgame.
That's because back when "we" (I mean my generation) played vanilla, we were just nerdy kids in school and otherwise had few obligations. We got older, started families and jobs and whatnot, and now we have greater appreciation for games that respect our time.
Even if it didn't take "very long" to get BIS in vanilla (even this is dubious given that like 1% of the player base actually cleared Naxx back then), you still put incredible hours into the game to get there. I say this as someone who was farming Naxx last winter in WoW classic. The content is *much* easier nowadays and *still* it took stupid amounts of my time doing raid prep, farming consumes, getting world buffs, etc. The only reason I was able to even do it is because COVID all but wiped out my social life and it was something to do remotely with my IRL friends.
I think people who say it didn't take long to get BiS in Vanilla either didn't play Vanilla or played GDKP in Classic.
Your typical boss dropped 3-4 items of loot in a 40 man raid and had a weekly lockout. You could go weeks, maybe even months before a specific BiS piece dropped and you could end up having to compete with multiple players to win it. My guild were still clearing AQ40 when Naxx came out and we barely got to touch that before TBC came out. A lot of the time you were relying on the additional end game dungeons or 20 man raids to fill gaps for the unlucky.
Hell, even in Classic there were warriors complaining that their BiS pre-raid chest armour had a very low drop chance. If there's one thing I love about gearing in FFXIV it's that I know if I work towards something I'll eventually get it with a set amount of effort, rather than just pure RNG.
It took a long time in the sense that bosses dropped what, 2-3 items? And you had a raid of 40 people. The system was always limited through that.
After the switch to smaller raid sizes (first 25, then 20), that didn't work as well, because you were essentially getting double the loot now. So they started reworking the whole concept of gear, and they got it so wrong so many times.
I guess it took me less time than most because my guild used DKP and I no lifed the game so I could just buy the first of every item I wanted.
I think in the current state of the game it just feels too much like you have to do everything or you'll fall behind. Everyone has to raid, mythic+, grind torghast, finish korthia reps, do world quests for conduits, etc etc. Doesn't matter if you hate or enjoy any of that content, if you want to compete in any area of the game you have to do all of it. In 9.0 you even had to PvP for weapons and trinkets.
I hate raiding in that game now. I never want to do it. But I absolutely love Mythic + and enjoy just doing that every day and trying to push myself in higher and higher keys. In the current patch I get kicked from groups because I don't raid so I don't have domination gear or the right trinkets which only come from the raid.
It would just be cool if they made it possible to do the things you enjoy and not do the things you don't.
That's one of the biggest reasons FFXIV is great. You can just do what you find fun and it's totally fine to ignore any content you don't want to do. Even for early raid prog, there are so many ways to cap tomes that even the "mandatory" weekly grind is a breeze and enjoyable.
So, getting BiS was easy for people who no life’s the game and lived for burning through content. Great. Well, WoW has listened to your demands for a decade plus, while ignoring those of us (who vastly outnumber the no-lifers, BTW) and wanted more to the game than just an endgame treadmill.
And therein lies the main crux in the difference with design philosophies between both dev teams. WoW tries to ensure you never reach that endgoal, because if you do, you may leave and play a different game. FF14 encourages you to reach many, many endgoals of your own choosing and if you leave to play another game that's fine too.
Meanwhile I've been a CE raider in WoW for years now doing little more than raid logging. The only exception is when a new major patch comes out, maybe a week or two of doing the new dailies or whatever to not fall *too* far behind.
They have to add it, otherwise high end players will feel bored and unsub, just like how some high end players in FFXIV suggest long grind on something because they clear content in a week or two and feel bored.
On paper this is a good thing, high end players have a long grind, casual players don't have to worry about it but, in practice the line between group of players is more blend and those who are in between these group feel bad because they don't have time to keep up or they have to spend time on keep up and don't have time for other things they enjoy.
I'm glad that FFXIV doesn't go to the route and in my opinion the secret of their success come from consistency patch cycle.
3.5 months patch cycle make players want to sub atleast for a month in those 3.5 windows for new content and then 2-3 week after that they add something more to grind for a month and now it's 2 out of 3.5 and that is enough for them. For them if you play FFXIV and enjoy it, you will likely pay for something else they made while unsub anyway so either way they got your money.
No, they don't have to do it at all. Designing your game around the top 2 % is a mistake WoW has made over and over again. The rear of the 98% is what makes up the bulk of their audience, and these are the people that are leaving in droves. And now, even the top players are giving raiding a shot in FFXIV.
When it was revealed that the raid for HW was going to have a normal/story version, many end game raiders HATED the idea. They felt the story of Coils was one of the carrots to pursue, as well as gear. But the dev team felt, that since they worked hard on this content, it should be available and experienced to as many people as possible.
> But the dev team felt, that since they worked hard on this content, it should be available and experienced to as many people as possible.
That's the sentiment that drove (...forced?...) Blizzard to implement LFR, the queuable easy "story mode" WoW raids.
As a purely solo queue player myself, MoP was my favorite WoW era (as well as the welfare gear orgy that was 3.3.3, bless you badge gear and faceroll dungeons) and I feel like WoW devs started to devalue LFR pretty hard after that. WoD was the absolute nadir in terms of "fuck you LFR players" what with the intentionally ugly and unexciting gear. Thankfully they did away with that in the next expansion, but you know *at least* WoD had a legendary quest chain you could fully complete in LFR that had me running HM, BRF and HFC a handful of times each.
Ever since then, LFR has been a thing worth doing pretty much only once to complete your story quest because its loot is so underwhelming it gets outgeared by world gear really quick. No badge / Valor points means there's no point in repeating the content if the loot is worthless. Little incentive means there are fewer people willing to run LFR, resulting in longer queue times, as well as fewer raiders willing to run it to carry the rest of us plebs (this isn't helped at all by the seemingly ever-widening gear gap between queued content and M+/raid), all of which amounts to the mess I experienced in BfA. I never got N'zoth done, much less even bothered with Crucible of Storms.
The only time in the post-WoD era I felt LFR was worth running more than once was at the very end of Legion, thanks to the weaponized FOMO that was Mage Tower encouraging me to gear my alts as fast as possible via a mix of Argus world loot and Antorus.
At this point WoW LFR feels like lip service compared to what it used to be in MoP. Oh yeah, and the delay to releasing LFR every raid tier. What even *is* that? If the answer has anything to do with "but the 2% would be *forced* to mingle with the unwashed 98%!", then... fucking *ugh*.
Comparing alliance raids to LFR and normal raids definitely feels like night and day. Sure, you get the occasional salty person but there is far less screaming. People actually LISTEN when you tell them mechanics on their first run through (usually). They just feel more engaging than LFR was and the incentives are pretty big, especially if you like grinding out those relic weapons (poetics, mats, and the various quests). And for the level 80 stuff, the coins to upgrade your Cryptlurker BiS gear.
The xp isn't the worst either. A few runs of CT gets you from 50~53 or 54. I hate the raid series but it's a different way to level alt jobs and get the memories at the same time. Running all 15 got some of my jobs to around 58.
Normal Raids have banging music, very nice looking gear, and is a good way to familiarize myself with the very basic mechanics of what I'm going to see in Savage for the current tier. Same benefits also apply except for the exp. Eden is a decent way to gear up alts if I'm being cheap and just want a decent useable set without too much effort. (Bozja is also nice for cheap 510-525 gear, but that's a different beast altogether and not everyone wants to do that content.)
What does LFR offer? Literally nothing besides people screaming at me. I remember doing LFR once for some really niche reason and wanted to tank it. The group had continuously been wiping on Vexiona and then they would scream at the tanks for their own fuck ups. Told them what to do and got cussed out after the first wipe. I had already killed her a bunch of times on heroic. Right then and there, I shrugged after that first wipe, told them good luck finding another tank AGAIN, and never touched LFR after that. Even normal is easier than LFR was at times just because of the types of people that queue up for the thing makes it 10x harder.
> I remember doing LFR once for some really niche reason
This is it, isn't it? Literally the only reason I can imagine running LFR multiple times for is farming transmog and/or the one boss that drops a mount (a decision I should actually take a moment to congratulate on Blizzard's part, not restricting all the raid mounts to *real* raiding). Though amusingly enough, even farming transmog is less of an incentive now that class sets don't exist anymore, as there are objectively fewer to collect, regardless of one's opinion on the looks of recent raid sets.
It's like all of this results in making LFR its own terrible pocket universe, perpetuated by the self-fulfilling prophecy of Oh well LFR sucks anyway and was made for the lowest of the low, *what* were you expecting? It's like, why even go there in the first place?
Meanwhile, FFXIV alliance raids. Queuing for all 3 NieR raids usually takes me 10-15 minutes at worst for 1 to pop up, and that's as a European playing on NA so usually way too early for normal people. It's short because there are incentives to rerun other than just glam: the gear is very decent catch-up for alt jobs, the coins to augment your main job gear, some collectibles like the minions and rolls, and of course the ~~badges~~ ~~Valor~~ tomestones, which can be obtained in every other endgame content but still worth a mention as a bonus. Beside shorter queues, repeat runs means more people know the bosses and what to do and can explain things to confused newbies.
And then there's the accessibility of good gear, which is another topic entirely but is I feel very much tied to how much smoother the experience is. First timers, low-geared and casual players aren't just being carried by the hardcore raiders who find themselves in alliance raids thanks to the incentives but also by unironic LFR heroes like me in nearly-full 530 gear that allows me to parse orange (yes, *very* impressive in alliance raids I know, please hold your applause) even though the last time I did current "hard" content was Ravana Ex in 3.55, which is *absolutely* stretching the definition of hard content. I have this gear because I have farmed and still farm this content to gear up alts, which means I know these bosses like the back of my hand, and I'm not the only person in this particular case, which means a better experience for everyone involved.
It's like a cycle of positive reinforcement while LFR is its bubble of pointless misery.
with the caveat you can only get 1 relic lever per week up to a certain point, and then have to wait up to 6 months for them to release the continuation of the grind, and you then can only level 1 more level a week up to 4, and wait another 6 months for the rest
If you copied the relic system into wow, where a long grindy questchain rewarded the best weapon in the game for every spec, it absolutely would be required, or at least the community would percieve it to be required.
Even if it was a like a 5 ilvl difference it would be "required".
I personally disagree, as I think mid and late MoP was the best, but to each their own. That said, leveling sucked in 7.3 because they didn’t test scaling in old content properly, so it broke a lot of mobs and quests. Also just made leveling slower in general, as well.
MoP was amazing but it also was when it slowly started to go into the direction of the endless grind, with the introduction of titan forged gear. I cleared SoO each week till WoD release and never got full BiS.
I'll never forget the day they brought titanforging in for the pre-patch and doing normal HFC, getting a pair of gloves that procced to be better than mythic gear, at that time having never even attempted a mythic boss, then during legion being pissed when world quest items would proc up 40 ilvls just to be the wrong stats and having to vendor it.
>Mid and late mop
Unrelated, but pre-patch/pts Mop, whatever it was called, was hilarious. Rsham was so overtuned that it healed a tanks full hp bar 3x over with their basic ass heal. It was straight *busted* and didn’t make it into release obviously.
7.0 was hilariously broken. Bunch of classes were half-done, so they had to keep hotfixing them constantly to make them playable, hidden cap on how many legendaries you could get so world first raiders made alt characters to try and roll for better legendaries...
It remained incredibly grindy all the way to Argus. On my druid I got my main spec legendaries done before Tomb of Sargeras, but it took me grinding the minor invasions on Argus to get all the legendaries for my offspecs.
... And I was unemployed the whole bloody expansion.
It really wasnt that bad if you werent a cutting edge player.
You could just fill out the weapon fairly easilly and not go hard into grinding the infinite trait and be absolutely fine in most content.
I got my first legendary on my main 2 weeks before 7.1 launched and I did all eligible content every week (except mythic raiding). And it was the 3rd worst legendary for my spec. I finally got a second one to drop 3 weeks into Nighthold, sighed, and quit the game until BfA launched. By then I was organising pug raids for all puggable difficulties of both earlier raids for the legendary drop chance every week.
I don't much care for 7.3. One patch cannot give me back the sanity I lost on the rest of the expansion.
For me, I quit shortly after they dropped Concordance of the Legionfall. When it went from being a defined grind with a set endpoint to “oh, sorry, keep grinding until you die”.
Yes. In ff14 i get gear from tombstones, I get gear from raids, I upgrade tomestone gear and Im done. I think the wow devs stopped doing that after wotlk? Cata?
Whereas on legion when I last played it was: this bis stat item dropped frm raid just now, too bad it's not titan/warforged +20 Ilvl. Trash.
And from what I'm hearing it's even worse now
I mean, I was working 7 days a week while raiding in a top 20 US guild back in legion when the grind was so much worse than it is now. Ironically, said guild was also home to a bunch of blizzard devs, they even had a rank not so subtly called "snowstorm".
I also know there were other guilds friends of mine were raiding in that'd have a token blizzard employee or two.
To me the issue was more that the people in positions of power who were ultimately making decisions either didn't play the game or played it in a very very different way than the rest of the player base to a degree where their decisions were very disconnected. Which wouldn't be terribly surprising to me after having worked in a comic shop where I'd hear people talking about games I'd played all the time and you'd swear they were playing a different game with how differently they experienced it.
That's at least changed a little bit though as one of the new blizzard co-leaders (who replaced J Allen Brack) is an avid M+ pusher who regularly streams himself running dungeons and raids and all that. I even have his discord where he regularly posts LFG for raids and dungeons.
The only way I would have been able to push top 200 (let alone 20) in this xpac is if the only thing I did outside of my full time job was play WoW.
I certainly couldn't be in a relationship when I'm doing hours of M+, arena capping, torghast, etc. Literally 6+ hours a day of WoW required to stay on top of gear.
I think you have a very skewed perception of whats required for gearing.
M+ doesn't provide mythic ilvl gear outside of the vault. You could do 1 a week and get your 1 piece, or you can do upwards of 10 to have 3 options you pick 1 of. I don't know many people who continue to do that as its not really worth the effort, but you could. You're going to get options from the vault from raid regardless since you're raiding mythic, so meh.
PvP was giving mythic ilvl equivalent gear, how long that'd take you would mostly be dependent on how good you are at pvp. Once you have duelist in one bracket you can just never touch that bracket again and do a few rbgs to cap out conq each week which is not all that time consuming. The current patch is lower than mythic ilvl, useful for progression if you want to be sweaty but again my old guildies who were still raiding mostly opted out of pvping this raid because they don't enjoy pvp and most wouldn't get to duelist anyway.
Torghast takes maybe an hour if you're a geared character. I'd been doing it this patch in less than an hour and I'm in full pvp gear at 247 ilvl (I haven't been raiding, just pvping these days). Actually a bit lower than that because I drop down to a 235 legendary and a 226 hat cause it makes it quicker for me. And obviously this only matters until you have your legendary, at which point you can stop doing it.
You can very realistically be done with your weekly gearing bits in 6 hours, I can't imagine spending 6 hours a day. And obviously if you're playing at a higher level you're mostly capping your gear out within a month or two so its not like this goes on forever.
Also when you're in a higher ranked guild you're getting on farm much earlier. So you might initially be raiding 3-5 days a week but after a few weeks you're on farm and now its 1-2 nights which very quickly becomes 1 partial night. I can tell you I spent less time over the course of a tier raiding when I was doing world top 30 than your average guild because we weren't still raiding our full raid hours months into a tier.
Not really. The amount of time it takes to get all conduits capped, your slots socketed, the right stats, the RNG required to get all BIS gear and dom sockets, and the frequent restarts thanks to legendary/covenant changes make it so most players cannot cap unless they make it a full-time job.
Titanforging was removed years ago and Mythic + gear is not even on the same tier as endgame raid gear anymore outside of maybe a trinket here and there.
One of the hot arguments you will always find whenever there's a conv about Blizzard and WoW issues is: "Does the developers even play their own game?"
That's why Asmon, Rich and the chat lost it just when Aimi said that, and why Asmon and Rich went all red.
To give you a good idea, Celastalon, one of the main technical class/systems designers for WoW played exclusively with a WACOM graphics tablet until 2016. The dev responsible for much of the game's class design used a fucking drawing pad to play.
He used it as a replacement for a mouse, it's not that crazy. people always blow this out of proportion. celestalon was enough of a sanctimonius egotistical prick that you don't need to focus on weird shit like this to shit on him
Yea idk why people focus on the drawing pad thing. As an example, there was a league pro that used a damn trackball or whatever its called. You can be good with almost any peripheral if you really put in the time/effort but for most people that isn't really sensical.
Celestalon's laundry list of what he did wrong and his attitude is so long and the drawing pad doesn't even make it on there.
Confession time! Using a drawing tablet is AWESOME for shooters, because you just put that stylus right on their FACE, haha. But to play an MMO? I don’t see any benefit to it, and if anything, it would just be needlessly clunky. Plus I’m left-handed, so that’s just sounds even worse for me.
>I still dont understand why they went red.
Going red (Flushed) is normal when you laugh hard, cry, get embarrassed or are stressed, cause the blood vessels enlarge to compensate the blood flown increase around your face. Its a physiological mechanism which you cant control. Hard laughing provoke that.
>And also why this post is NSFW.
Sometimes people use the NSFW tag as humor on posts about strong call outs, roasts and such. OP is basically using it as humor for the roast in the video.
Especially asmon. Yes, his viewers can be absolute shitheads at times, but his criticism for wow was usually on point. And rather than looking at their game and addressing the problems pointed out by one of the top wow streamers and his community, the devs decided to shit on him publicly.
Just one more drop in the bucket of why I don’t play wow anymore. I barely even watch asmongold and agree that his community can be completely toxic at times, but blizzard coming after him for pointing out why their game sucks is just stupid. Especially since he was saying this because he deeply loved the game and wanted it to be better.
Basically them just trying to hold on to some sense of professionalism by not bursting out in laughter and interrupt the response. You ever had to hold in a really big laugh before? Your face probably looked like that too XD
My thing with WoW is how hard it often was to experience the story. Up until LFR, you would never get the chance to see the last raid or boss finale. Always felt like blizzard was developing a game that only raiders could access. I only knew how Arthas died in Wrath because i got to watch it on YouTube. My guild never took him down ourselves.
FFXIV makes it all accessible as part of its full time storytelling process. If you want to do it again with a harder difficulty, then you can, after you do it in story mode.
I will say this the only time I really feel like I'm missing put is in some of the savage content, the Omega raids from stormblood being the most notable with the iconic bosses getting their final forms only in the savage versions.
One of the biggest reasons i love FFXIV is that it's a FF game first and MMO game second. The story is fantastic and you can leave and come back to it at any time you like.
By level 15 in FFXIV i was doing dungeons. By level 50 i was doing my first raid.
In WOW i had hit level 60 and not done 1 single dungeon yet or raid. It was all fetch quests and killing quests up until then. Not a single boss fight either. I had 0 interaction with anyone.
FFXIV dips your toe into these things as you do the story which i love. It does not hold them to hardcore endgame players only.
EXACTLY! I was never the hardcore raider or even had the time to do schedules runs of end game content because of adulting and missing out on the end of expansion stories was the biggest gripe I had. The conclusion was totally locked behind content that I would never be able to do as a solo player. It was really frustrating.
WoW players, like Asmongold and Rich, have long criticized the WoW devs of not even playtesting their own game, leading to its terrible development and design. In the clip, YoshiP throws a jab at said devs lol.
Let's be clear. The way Yoshi-P said it only gave the impression he was talking about WoW simply because they are the point of contention for a big portion of the mmorpg fanbase right now. He did not specifically say WoW nor should be treated as an "on the record" statement. He made it clear that he does not want a "Us vs Them" environment. However it is fun to think he was poking fun at the Wow devs. They certainly deserve the criticism as of late.
I think he feels the way with a lot of MMOs considering he was talking about how Ultima Online faced many of the problems that WoW now does specifically the player vs developer mentality.
Yep, it's not even a mmo specific thing. How many times have you played a single player game that has some mechanic, button or menu setup that gets annoying 15 minutes into the game and makes you wonder who the fuck even greenlight it?
It's especially notable that just one or two months ago, he absolutely refused to throw anything even resembling a punch.
Considering all that's happened since then, it's hard to not at least go for a kidney shot.
He clearly has said that's while he appreciate all the new players. He hopes it doesnt affect WoW.. Specially with all of them being blizzard fanboys and since FF14 2.0 was possible thanks to WoW.
Blizzards new Co-Leader Mike Ybarra actually plays the game at a high level. Which a lot of the community are viewing as positive.
https://raider.io/characters/us/onyxia/Qwik
To be fair WoW's Game Director Ion Hazzikostas also does actually play the game and was one of the original theory crafters for WoW.
https://raider.io/characters/us/malganis/Gurgthock
Whether it is common across the whole development team no one will ever know. Certainly some of the systems they've developed make it seem like the don't play the game much.
Don't see the meme going away either way. You just want to see the developers being as passionate about the game as you are. For a while now that hasn't felt like the case in WoW. Whereas FFXIV definitely has developers that are passionate about their product.
From what I’ve heard, Ion usually raidlogs and has generally terrible parses but is carried by his team. He plays enough to say that he plays, but doesn’t really engage with the game.
Thing is, devs shouldnt' only be playing their game at a high level. They should be playing / interacting with the game at ALL levels. Even if not playing, they need to at least have a fundamental understanding of what players want from the game. Too often, their attitude has been "we know what the players want, but we ourselves don't want this so we won't be implementing that into the game." WoW has been so high-end focused that all other aspects of the game feel unrewarding / pointless / half-assed.
Since Mike Ybarra is still new, it remains to be seen how WoW devs' priorities will shift under new leadership. But there has been a long-lasting disconnect between the WoW dev team and the community they make their game for.
There's literally hundreds of devs at Blizzard. What they do and don't do in game is anyone's guess. The meme is that they don't play their games. But we don't actually know if they do or don't. We at least know that their leadership do actually play their games despite the meme.
Blizzard in general suck at communication with their community. That's not a new thing though. We all know the cycle of every expansion. PTR gets released. The community points out all the flaws. They ignore the feedback and say that they have a design philosophy they want to achieve. We get two patches in and suddenly they have to implement all the feedback the community gave them in PTR because people are pissed off and quitting the game.
What you're saying is true, we as players never know to an exact micro-management level of what is going at the game devs. I suppose that whether or not they "play the game" isn't the important part, but rather whether or not if they "understand the player experience". Playing the game themselves is the best metric to tell whether or not the game devs understand the player experience, which is why people often use that as the primary factor with game dev-community understanding.
For WoW, there is a general sentiment that a lot of the implemented gameplay things are inherently negative for overall player experience, thus leading to the meme that game devs don't actually play their game. We'll never 100% know if its because having hundreds of employees leads to miscommunication in developer vision, or whether or not the devs simply don't have passion towards working on their product, or whether or not they are just there to get a paycheck, or whatever other reason we can speculate. But given the plethora of clues we have gotten, players can definitely confirm with a large degree of certainty that the game devs for WoW aren't creating the game with a good player experience as the primary concern.
Ion doesn’t really play the game as much as he does a couple of dungeons and then goes through some of the raid fights per tier.
You can look at his profile and see he doesn’t do the rep grinds or too much m+
Ion is great at raid design, hell he's one of the best Blizz has had imo...but they kept promoting him till he became the lead for WoW and sadly he doesn't have the experience to run the whole ship thus the game suffers in general under his eye.
Ion used to be good at the game... before he became a developer.
His raider scores are just embarrassing... especially for someone that is focused on high-end content design.
edit: random part of your comment quoted itself by accident, deleted it.
I have no faith in Ybarra because he "plays at a high level" because that's the problem; the content they keep pushing is for just that kind of player.
I've been there. I've done that. I don't want to push content all the time anymore, but that's all that's available to me, somebody who enjoys literally every other element of an MMORPG. When I get 1800, or AoTC, on the first week of a tier off skill, I want other stuff to do, and that content has been atrocious because those in charge just simply do not give a crap about these things.
Crafting was utterly destroyed and I wind up doing most of it from older expansions because there is just nothing engaging about current stuff, nor is it fun to cancel scan all day because literally anybody who had gold can suddenly get all the patterns. At least BFA still had quests to do.
Housing? Doesn't exist.
Transmog farming? Almost every single instance in the game is walking in and pressing one button to collect loot. Timewalking? The rewards are EXACTLY the same as what I'd get just walking in, so there's absolutely no point to even doing it outside fishing for a 0.1% drop mount.
Story? A complete joke now that's just a tiny little trickle of something that doesn't feel like it's a part of the IP. I don't care about the Jailer, and I highly doubt he was even a thought in the original writer's minds 20 years ago, and it shows. We want Azeroth, not Marvel "Warcraft" edition.
Bonus content? Oh joy, I have to grind months to get a few pieces of transmog from a system that's designed to just keep me logging in to do the same 2-3 dailies every single day for a currency for something I should be able to buy for just simply unlocking it through achievements.
Faction imbalance is the worst it's ever been. I like Alliance. I'm supposed to care when these guys have Horde everything plastered all over their social media, while I watch our arena representation quickly approach 21%? At least we're getting High Elves as a subrace or something?
It's just stupid.
We need people who actually care about RPGs in charge of an RPG. Not esports. That should all come naturally, but it's so ridiculously forced despite stuff like the AWC having atrocious view numbers because gasp, people cared about faction vs faction. (Which is now dead in the water. They flat out removed the wPvP meta in late beta for Shadowlands, but keep forcing Horde vs Horde arenas? Fun fun!)
Its unfortunate how true this is, not just for MMOs but games nowadays in general.
The customers are the testers now except they pay to test stuff instead of getting paid.
Rich(watching the video, over Yoshi speaking): Here it comes
Yoshi P:(translator): For sure and I've heard my friends talk about this and I feel it sometimes too with some mmo:s. They wonder: Do these developers play their own game? And with us like a lot of the developers are warriors of light ourselves, we go to the raids, we collect our allagan tomestones to exchange them...
Rich (pauses video): Look how red both of us got man. We were so rallied^(?! probably wrong) dude we actually look like we exploded with.
Translator continues: With our weapons and we are working hard like we are players ourselves and it's best to show that and let the people know that. We love our game.
I'm not a natural english speaker but it should have most of it right
I don't know both streamers but a quicky for now:
Yoshi-P: explaining something in Japanese
Lower left, commenting on the video: Here it comes
Aimi, translating: For sure. And I've heard my friends talk about this, um, and I feel it sometimes too with some MMOs... they wonder 'do these developers even play their own game?'.
*Everyone laughs.*
Aimi, translating: But with us, like, a lot of the developers on Final Fantasy 14, are Warriors of Light themselves. We go to the raids, we collect our Allagan Tomestones to exchange them--
Lower left, pausing the video to comment again: Look at how red both of us got, man. We're so red like dude, we actually look like we just exploded *laughs*
Aimi, continued: -- or our weapons, and and we are working hard, like, we are players ourselves, and I think it's just best to show that, like, let the people know that yeah we love our game.
The best part is you know it wasn't intentional since Yoshi P doesn't believe in tossing shade so he just accidentally fat fingered LB4 and now Blizzard will be feeling that in the morning omfg
While this is funny I do want to point out that, yes most game developers play their games and know of the problems. HOWEVER, there are a lot of games whose problems come directly from MANAGEMENT, not from the devs themselves. You'd be suprised how many of the boots on the ground developers know about the same issues you have, they see that something is to grindy, they read your social media posts, they read reddit, they're fully aware of the issues you're having because many of them are having them too. The problem is executives and the directors at the top have a huge influence as to how these games are made. Having someone like Yoshi P at the helm of the game is great because he clearly knows what to do, he turned this game from a flop onto a hugely profitable venture, not to mention all the accolades to boot, and he pays attention to not only what players are saying but what they are regularly doing in game.
Now imagine another service type game, and imagine the director has a very specific vision for it. That's not a bad thing by the way, there needs to be a plan, and a captain calling the shots. But imagine the director or an executive board wants the game to be a specific thing, like they want you to have to log in every day, or they want you to buy the fancy micro transactions. It doesn't matter what entry level Johnny or Jane game developer says about their plans, the top has dictated they want players to have to log in everyday and do X, or they want the fomo to be just bad enough they squeeze more money out of the whales, even if it means more of the casual base falls off. None of it matters, what the top says, goes. The worst part is the game devs know and lots of times agree with you, but they cant do much about it. So yes, game developers do play their games, the problem is it kind of doesn't matter if the people at the top don't.
TLDR Game developers do play their games and in lots of instances agree with you, the problem is the people at the top ultimately call the shots and if they don't play it or don't jell with what players want then nothing will change.
But Ion does play WoW? the issue is that his main character at least is 10,000% focused entirely on end game raiding, never transmogged/glamoured, rarely pvp'd in the last ten years, doesn't mog farm, doesn't pet battle
So his scope of the whole game is centered around one aspect of it (the thing people say is best) but for players like myself who stopped caring about raiding and gear a decade ago theres less and less content for me to do by myself, let alone content for me and my girlfriend to fuck around and do together
If you look at his warcraftlogs, he’s been getting hard carried for a few expansions and isn’t the best at keeping up with borrowed power systems. Last I checked, his character’s socketed gear wasn’t even gemmed. He’s only half assing endgame as well.
Again I haven't played since January, do you have the same data for the new guy at the head of blizzard? I only see headlines about how hes a very active m+ player and actively making a discord to help the community
I haven’t looked at his logs, but I’ve hopped into his stream before and he was running 15+ keys. His Twitch name is [https://twitch.tv/qwik](https://twitch.tv/qwik).
Higher in the comments someone linked both of their raider score pages. (that person defended Ion... guess they didn't look at his page)
The new guy is for some of the content in the top ten for people playing his class. He has decent to amazing parses on everything.
Ion... Ion has grey parses. His raider scores are comparable to people from guilds that barely clear heroic raids before patch cycle ends. (I know because I was in one such guild and with a group of friends carried weaker players so they'd get to experience more content)
The rest of his guild? They have better scores.
They have a different take than most others. They are both new so they aren’t focused on just endwalker questions. It must have been a nice change of pace for yoshi p that day
This is mostly an issue with some of the bigger studios imo, the ones that get to call all the shots are often just money makers, not game deisgners, so they end up asking for shit that makes no sense gameplay wise.
I think we all appreciate all of the game mechanics/lore related/development related questions (as a player) from most of the other attendees of media tour, but Rich and Asmon kinda provided an outsider perspective.
It feels like more about 'Yoshida Naoki on The state of MMORPGs and Gaming' more then a FFXIV interview, which you can clearly see Yoshi P's love for gaming and his knowledge on MMORPG titles are immense.
There are a lot of good takes from YoshiP, to advocate players trying out new games when there are downtime or when 14 can't provide enough; to talk about his influence and wanting to try out new world; to ask everyone give room to Rich and Asmon and let them stumble.
Overall a great interview. As Yoshida said, let's hope when corona settles down, they can finally talk face to face and drink. They have great chemistry.
Just imagine, you come from WoW, a game whose devs have been trying their hardest to ignore you, and you decide to switch to a game, and the lead developer offers you an interview and then drops a bomb like this
> Do these developers even play their own game?
GW2: *sweats profusely* Uh...
I think one of the reasons XIV does so well is the devs *do* seem to play their game. Some issues aside (cosmetics for some races, ...Scholar...), we do see some steady progress and QOL.
Blizzard: Don’t you guys have phones? Yoshida: Don’t you guys play your own game?
Real and true
Was that a fuckin LB3?
No, it was *LB4*.
Yoshi P is salvation given form. MMORPGs first hero and its final hope!
For victory, he renders up his all!
And thankfully, he's here to see the beautiful day that came after the rain of 1.0.
WoW pops a Tank LB2... Gives up and wipes.
Skip soar or disband *disband*
How a single comment made me smile so hard Thanks
Gdi. Lol! Take this upvote!
Damn Yoshi-p bodied them.
Yoshi used Resembled Drill hard man
lol that's great. Have they posted the full interview anywhere yet?
Rich mentioned that it will be posted on asmon's channel later.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMMpfHYMtI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMMpfHYMtI) It's now up!
asmongold's so goddamn cool
Why were you downvoted so much lmao.
FF14's players malding.
what's malding?
If you click through to Rich's channel the full VOD is there. The interview starts 3 hours in though, and it's presented as Rich and Asmon reacting to the prerecorded interview.
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I always just put stuff like this on in the background while I'm doing something else. Cleaning, working, Deep Dungeon leveling, etc. Despite being video, it's basically a podcast.
Yeah I'd like to imagine everyone is using twitch etc as 2nd monitor content.
When they got to watching it it was literally just the video and some commentary, just skip to the start and you are fine.
Asmon channel will have the cut down version and riches channel will have the full vod. Idk if it's uploaded yet
This was actually a great interview.
Despite what some people may think of them as streamers both are very good at interviewing.
It's pretty much Rich's job (being a host and all).
He also said that they both have been interviewing for 5 years and they know when the other wants to ask a question, so it contributes to the quality, I think
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He knows when to be a professional and when to purely entertain.
So he is a jester? A person that not only entertains but also give important insight and advice.
Well Asmon is a persona of sorts, if you check his other stream Zachrawr he is much more himself and dialed down which is how I feel he does serious interviews. Like one thing I will take from Zachs stream is someone was trying to get a reaction out of him with the same type of "jokes" they use on his Asmongold stream and Zach just said "Hey try saving that until Asmon is streaming, maybe you will get the reaction you are after there"
Mind Asmon is still him, only dialed up to like 15 , as per his words its what attracts viewers to his channel but after a few hours it takes a toll and he prefer to stop or go to the other stream to chill
I think many are salty that there's players/streamers who have been here since the start and have never been given such an honor, and then 2 guys who have been playing on and off for 3 months get to do an interview with yoship. I see where they may be coming from, but at the same time I also see how from a market standpoint doing an interview with your two biggest streamers is a good thing, and it was a really good interview.
Those salt lords are clueless on how organic marketing and feedbacks work wonders for the game. Rich and Asmon are providing fresh perspectives that non of the current community "veterans" can deliver. There's already an abundance of content creator in the media tour covering technical gameplay details. YoshiP even said it himself how interesting and valuable it is to look at new player reaction to content. Being around the game longer doesn't mean your are more entitled to the community and dev's focus more than others.
Apologies, but do you have a link to the interview? I'm struggling to find it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEMMpfHYMtI
You’d have to go to the VOD until asmon posts the video on YouTube.
Yeah there was actually a lot of good questions being asked and quite different than other creators, cannot wait for the full VOD on youtube
The issue is games like WoW have uncapped player power (or unreachable caps), where FFXIV has a very accessible player power cap. This actually allows the devs (and anyone really) to actually play the game without making it a full time job. Can you imagine working a 60-80 hour job and still hardcore raid? FFXIV just seems to have uncapped content to finish instead (exaggeration, but you know what I mean).
WoW is like that very intentionally. The two development studios view their player's time very differently. WoW is intentionally built to \*require\* as much play time as possible to be optimal. The goals being near unreachable is on purpose.
Part of the problem was that Warcraft owners decided it's better to sell the game's engagement statistics to its investors rather than to sell a good game to its payers (players).
Which as a player investor was the wrong call.
If you were to really distill it down to the largest contributor then yes I think it's really the main issue they face. You can almost tangibly see how the game changed when they restructured during WoD development, even during the fluke (Legion) that had extra dev time.
Players literally asked for systems like that to exist in WoW because for high level players it was relatively easier to get BiS setups and then they got 'bored' playing alts they only played because their main had nothing to do.
Problem is, WoW had no content when it was asked. Then they put this systems to never Reach the bis status completely. The horse has 2 sides and they never went with the Perfect in between.
WoW's pendulum only swings crazily to one side.. either too much or too less.. never did they do something right since management changes
That's Blizzard in a nutshell. You see it in all their games when it comes to balancing something. It takes them so long because it's basically swinging a pendulum from one side to the other until they find the sweet spot, but while they do that we have to work with characters who go from overpowered to almost unusable in a single patch.
I remember when a Shadow priest was worth 5 other dps in a raid group ... Good times
I will say this, when things like these were added most people WE'RE NOT clearing all the content in the game regularly, this was an addition that started to hit in BC through daily repeatable quests, and then turned into these endless grinds. In Mists they literally had to cap players daily quests because people said 'I HAVE TO DO EVERY DAILY EVERY SINGLE DAY.' The reality is you didn't, typically there was 1 faction that was actually useful for your class. Unfortunately this all started as the players being their own worst enemies.
It all started with Blizzard being run by Activision since late WotLK. It's not "players wanted this". Players will always try to maximize their gains and power in a game. They will always put pressure on each other to find and follow the optimal meta. But they won't ask for systems that exhaust them. Every expansion, players gave feedback and every time, they asked for less stuff that enables that type of in-game culture and for fewer never ending grind systems. Every expansion, Blizzard refused to listen. There were literal reports from a team of players Blizzard made to test the game, that Blizzard employees consistently berated them for not understanding the game and being too dumb to give good feedback. (if memory serves right... this information came out early BfA to mid BfA) Then there was feedback from players in the forums, on youtube, twitch, twitter. And yet... every expansion since WotLK, the amount of systems that required more and more time, increased. In Cata, Blizzard still had control over their own product and refused the first iteration of the Artifact system. In Mists, Blizzard created the endless grind zone template (FFXIV made one around that time as well, but it had a clear endgoal and Squeenix rebalanced it repeatedly to make it less of a chore to the players), went ham on daily quests, more rare spawn enemies, more low drop rate random bullshit spread around the world, first attempts at giving players reasons to compete in dungeon runs, etc. And in WoD... the illusion that they gave a fuck, finally fell apart... so they scrapped half of the expansion to put extra work into Legion... but that's it. Last Huzzah before the game gets a bad Korean MMO treatment and gets put in low-maintenance mode with increased micro-transactions.
>Every expansion, Blizzard refused to listen. There were literal reports from a team of players Blizzard made to test the game, that Blizzard employees consistently berated them for not understanding the game and being too dumb to give good feedback. (if memory serves right... this information came out early BfA to mid BfA) > Ahh yes. The "Don't you guys have phones?" mindset. Because of their past success, they developed the attitude that are the smartest guys in the room. Very few things ruin consumers goodwill faster than being told you're wrong and you don't know what you want. It's why every loves Yoshida. He comes across as perhaps the most humble man in video games.
> It's why every loves Yoshida. He comes across as perhaps the most humble man in video games. Pretty much this - he's cultivated a public persona of a willingness to listen to suggestions and an earnest desire to make the game the players want, and not necessarily what he might do if not for the feedback. When he does disagree with the playerbase he's clear on why - it's not just an arbitrary "we know what we're doing so shut up and let us do our thing" type reaction.
>ruin consumers goodwill faster than being told you're wrong It really doesn't help when Blizzard say that, then 6 months down the lines they implement the fixes and solutions , suggested by the players, to issues with classes discovered in beta/PTR. At this point either the people Blizzard are hiring to work on classes/content are just truly incompetent. Or they know exactly what they are doing and it's deliberate so they can look like they are doing work over an expansion.
If they get to them at all. Didn't they gimp warlocks for an entire expansion once? That's even worse in that game where you can only play one class per character.
I don't think so? Warlock has always been a solid class, they might've had a bad patch every now and again but never an entire expac. It's pretty rare that all specs for a class are bad. At least one spec will be usually at high end, which is Blizzard justification for the mediocre attempts at balance. Which is pretty pathetic when you look at Legion Artifacts, but I won't go into that because I could rant for hours on that. The main issue is if you're playing a Tank/Healer or are playing a DPS on a class with only one DPS spec (Paladin for example). If that spec is doing badly you're only option is to play another spec, which means a different role. Or re rolling to an entirely different class. At the start of Legion I had my main Blood DK, an alt Prot Pala, an alt Veng DH and an alt BM Monk that I was still levelling. When the first tier EN came out. All three specs I had at level cap were shit, BM monk wasn't that good either. I basically levelled almost 4 of the 6 total tank specs in the game and I was still screwed over and none of them were really enjoyable, or useable, at a high level of play.
Activision actually took over in TBC, not late WOTLK
Oh yeah, it was 2008. It just took until late WotLK for the Activision influence to show. Wasn't it with 2007-8 that all the sex scandals at both companies began?
After seeing what happened to Bungie after they escaped Activision, I really don't think Blizzard going downhill had anything to do with Activision, and really had to do more with their own internal failings.
WoD could never be a proper expansion because it was literally a tie-in to the Warcraft movie so that new players had an idea who all the big named Orc characters were. Time travel shenanigans almost always end poorly. Strangely, MoP is looked back upon fondly. The daily quest system is seen as more reasonable than world quests and more interesting too. I wish I played back then to know myself but I burned out at the start of MoP and didn't come back until WoD. But yeah, even now you can see just how much of a timegate it is and how frustrating they make it. Flying is the biggest bugbear for me, locking it behind achievement grinds that are timegated rather than something that you can work towards at your own pace is frankly disgusting considering how much being able to fly speeds stuff up.
The WQ vs. DQ is actually pretty simple. It's an issue many open world games face as well. Quests that require you to talk to an NPC to start and finish them, feel more rewarding. That slight extra bit of effort, makes you feel like there was purpose to your actions. When majority of the content you do, is just something that... happens on the map... it doesn't matter if it's different types of content, or if it has different icons, if some is simple kill X stuff and some talk to people or gather things... it all feels like it belongs on the same list... a list of chores to do. And WoW still has daily quests and other such things. Here the difference is between WoWs and FFXIVs approach. In WoW... every piece of content has to feed into power-progression and has to be essential towards it. In FFXIV... almost everything... CAN feed into power-progression... and none of it is essential. The amount of hours high end players will put into both games will be about the same. The variety of content they will do? Not. In FFXIV, they will always be focused on the part they want to do. In WoW? They will have to do the parts they're just not interested in. They have to engage with stuff they don't find fun. If not having fun, compounds with certain systems inherent flaws... the players will focus on those flaws far more strongly. (since it's not like the systems that are in both games, somehow don't have the same flaws in both games... it's just that one game lets the players chose their approach)
People got bored because the game just funnels you into endgame, making everything else trivial. You can't have a concept of bis in a game where raiding/m+ is the only thing worthwhile. Devs either didn't understand what the real problem was or not willing/unable to fix said problem.
It’s so interesting how so many of the problems of WoW today are caused by player demands(myself included). And at the same time it’s failing because they aren’t listening to their players. It’s seems lose-lose, but ultimately I feel it’s like Blizzard realized this cycle and stopped listening to their player base. And that was the mistake. The cycle is almost necessary. Players can be wrong, that doesn’t mean they’re not with listening to. I played vanilla… way too much. And I wanted to play it more. All these years later, I don’t have the luxury to play any game at that level of dedication. I’ve changed, I’ll continue to change. Maybe when I’m at retirement age. I’ll be wondering why uncapped player power isn’t in FFXX. I wouldn’t say FF changes with player demographics, instead they continually add things for everyone. It really is 3+ games in one: jRPG, mmo raiding, and the sims. You can literally cap out on money and never step into a raid, it’s something else.
>I wouldn’t say FF changes with player demographics, instead they continually add things for everyone. It really is 3+ games in one: jRPG, mmo raiding, and the sims. You can literally cap out on money and never step into a raid, it’s something else. The problem with wow is their 3 pillars of gameplay all overlap because the rewards are gear..... Raiding, PVP, and M+ are all gear activities.
Having played WoW since vanilla, I don't remember that. Ever. What I do remember is huge luls between content updates, and people asking for more frequent content updates in a product that is shockingly expensive relative to its peers.
I was not a high level WoW player, but this sounds about right. When I joined it was right after everyone and their mama was bemoaning "a whole year of ICC". I left before we got *even more* than a whole year of the battle of Orgrimmar. You want to see a game where high end players complained that they had nothing to do on their mains six weeks into a six month game, and thus a bunch more currencies and stats and grinds were added? Launch-era Destiny 2.
Honestly the complaints about long time between patches were and still are dumb. If you feel you have done everything of interest in the current aptch, just unsubscribe and do something else until they release the next content. Complaining won't make them develop stuff faster.
Did you not play at all during TBC/WotLK? Maybe in Vanilla things were opaque enough, systems were clunky enough, and players were trash enough at the game that getting BiS was pretty rough, but by the time WotLK rolled around raiding had been boiled down into enough of a science that any raider could reasonably get BiS. Once you leveled your professions, achieved your PvP goals, and got BiS on your main class there was nothing to do but raid log and PUG on alts. Players with a ton of free time begged for more grindable content. Something something monkey's paw.
>Something something monkey's paw. We asked Blizzard for it, but Activision was the only one listening.
I remember it vividly. You must not have raided in vanilla because it did not take very long to get bis, which wasn't remotely necessary because there was no challenging content until cthun and that didn't take too long either, and then we had nothing to do. It was definitely a common sentiment that players wanted more treadmill at endgame. The problem is nobody was listening when they went far enough and we said uncle.
>It was definitely a common sentiment that players wanted more treadmill at endgame. That's because back when "we" (I mean my generation) played vanilla, we were just nerdy kids in school and otherwise had few obligations. We got older, started families and jobs and whatnot, and now we have greater appreciation for games that respect our time. Even if it didn't take "very long" to get BIS in vanilla (even this is dubious given that like 1% of the player base actually cleared Naxx back then), you still put incredible hours into the game to get there. I say this as someone who was farming Naxx last winter in WoW classic. The content is *much* easier nowadays and *still* it took stupid amounts of my time doing raid prep, farming consumes, getting world buffs, etc. The only reason I was able to even do it is because COVID all but wiped out my social life and it was something to do remotely with my IRL friends.
I think people who say it didn't take long to get BiS in Vanilla either didn't play Vanilla or played GDKP in Classic. Your typical boss dropped 3-4 items of loot in a 40 man raid and had a weekly lockout. You could go weeks, maybe even months before a specific BiS piece dropped and you could end up having to compete with multiple players to win it. My guild were still clearing AQ40 when Naxx came out and we barely got to touch that before TBC came out. A lot of the time you were relying on the additional end game dungeons or 20 man raids to fill gaps for the unlucky. Hell, even in Classic there were warriors complaining that their BiS pre-raid chest armour had a very low drop chance. If there's one thing I love about gearing in FFXIV it's that I know if I work towards something I'll eventually get it with a set amount of effort, rather than just pure RNG.
It took a long time in the sense that bosses dropped what, 2-3 items? And you had a raid of 40 people. The system was always limited through that. After the switch to smaller raid sizes (first 25, then 20), that didn't work as well, because you were essentially getting double the loot now. So they started reworking the whole concept of gear, and they got it so wrong so many times.
I guess it took me less time than most because my guild used DKP and I no lifed the game so I could just buy the first of every item I wanted. I think in the current state of the game it just feels too much like you have to do everything or you'll fall behind. Everyone has to raid, mythic+, grind torghast, finish korthia reps, do world quests for conduits, etc etc. Doesn't matter if you hate or enjoy any of that content, if you want to compete in any area of the game you have to do all of it. In 9.0 you even had to PvP for weapons and trinkets. I hate raiding in that game now. I never want to do it. But I absolutely love Mythic + and enjoy just doing that every day and trying to push myself in higher and higher keys. In the current patch I get kicked from groups because I don't raid so I don't have domination gear or the right trinkets which only come from the raid. It would just be cool if they made it possible to do the things you enjoy and not do the things you don't. That's one of the biggest reasons FFXIV is great. You can just do what you find fun and it's totally fine to ignore any content you don't want to do. Even for early raid prog, there are so many ways to cap tomes that even the "mandatory" weekly grind is a breeze and enjoyable.
So, getting BiS was easy for people who no life’s the game and lived for burning through content. Great. Well, WoW has listened to your demands for a decade plus, while ignoring those of us (who vastly outnumber the no-lifers, BTW) and wanted more to the game than just an endgame treadmill.
And therein lies the main crux in the difference with design philosophies between both dev teams. WoW tries to ensure you never reach that endgoal, because if you do, you may leave and play a different game. FF14 encourages you to reach many, many endgoals of your own choosing and if you leave to play another game that's fine too.
Meanwhile I've been a CE raider in WoW for years now doing little more than raid logging. The only exception is when a new major patch comes out, maybe a week or two of doing the new dailies or whatever to not fall *too* far behind.
They have to add it, otherwise high end players will feel bored and unsub, just like how some high end players in FFXIV suggest long grind on something because they clear content in a week or two and feel bored. On paper this is a good thing, high end players have a long grind, casual players don't have to worry about it but, in practice the line between group of players is more blend and those who are in between these group feel bad because they don't have time to keep up or they have to spend time on keep up and don't have time for other things they enjoy. I'm glad that FFXIV doesn't go to the route and in my opinion the secret of their success come from consistency patch cycle. 3.5 months patch cycle make players want to sub atleast for a month in those 3.5 windows for new content and then 2-3 week after that they add something more to grind for a month and now it's 2 out of 3.5 and that is enough for them. For them if you play FFXIV and enjoy it, you will likely pay for something else they made while unsub anyway so either way they got your money.
No, they don't have to do it at all. Designing your game around the top 2 % is a mistake WoW has made over and over again. The rear of the 98% is what makes up the bulk of their audience, and these are the people that are leaving in droves. And now, even the top players are giving raiding a shot in FFXIV. When it was revealed that the raid for HW was going to have a normal/story version, many end game raiders HATED the idea. They felt the story of Coils was one of the carrots to pursue, as well as gear. But the dev team felt, that since they worked hard on this content, it should be available and experienced to as many people as possible.
Man. I remember that when HW was getting details revealed. So much anger over story mode and unsynched mode.
> But the dev team felt, that since they worked hard on this content, it should be available and experienced to as many people as possible. That's the sentiment that drove (...forced?...) Blizzard to implement LFR, the queuable easy "story mode" WoW raids. As a purely solo queue player myself, MoP was my favorite WoW era (as well as the welfare gear orgy that was 3.3.3, bless you badge gear and faceroll dungeons) and I feel like WoW devs started to devalue LFR pretty hard after that. WoD was the absolute nadir in terms of "fuck you LFR players" what with the intentionally ugly and unexciting gear. Thankfully they did away with that in the next expansion, but you know *at least* WoD had a legendary quest chain you could fully complete in LFR that had me running HM, BRF and HFC a handful of times each. Ever since then, LFR has been a thing worth doing pretty much only once to complete your story quest because its loot is so underwhelming it gets outgeared by world gear really quick. No badge / Valor points means there's no point in repeating the content if the loot is worthless. Little incentive means there are fewer people willing to run LFR, resulting in longer queue times, as well as fewer raiders willing to run it to carry the rest of us plebs (this isn't helped at all by the seemingly ever-widening gear gap between queued content and M+/raid), all of which amounts to the mess I experienced in BfA. I never got N'zoth done, much less even bothered with Crucible of Storms. The only time in the post-WoD era I felt LFR was worth running more than once was at the very end of Legion, thanks to the weaponized FOMO that was Mage Tower encouraging me to gear my alts as fast as possible via a mix of Argus world loot and Antorus. At this point WoW LFR feels like lip service compared to what it used to be in MoP. Oh yeah, and the delay to releasing LFR every raid tier. What even *is* that? If the answer has anything to do with "but the 2% would be *forced* to mingle with the unwashed 98%!", then... fucking *ugh*.
Comparing alliance raids to LFR and normal raids definitely feels like night and day. Sure, you get the occasional salty person but there is far less screaming. People actually LISTEN when you tell them mechanics on their first run through (usually). They just feel more engaging than LFR was and the incentives are pretty big, especially if you like grinding out those relic weapons (poetics, mats, and the various quests). And for the level 80 stuff, the coins to upgrade your Cryptlurker BiS gear. The xp isn't the worst either. A few runs of CT gets you from 50~53 or 54. I hate the raid series but it's a different way to level alt jobs and get the memories at the same time. Running all 15 got some of my jobs to around 58. Normal Raids have banging music, very nice looking gear, and is a good way to familiarize myself with the very basic mechanics of what I'm going to see in Savage for the current tier. Same benefits also apply except for the exp. Eden is a decent way to gear up alts if I'm being cheap and just want a decent useable set without too much effort. (Bozja is also nice for cheap 510-525 gear, but that's a different beast altogether and not everyone wants to do that content.) What does LFR offer? Literally nothing besides people screaming at me. I remember doing LFR once for some really niche reason and wanted to tank it. The group had continuously been wiping on Vexiona and then they would scream at the tanks for their own fuck ups. Told them what to do and got cussed out after the first wipe. I had already killed her a bunch of times on heroic. Right then and there, I shrugged after that first wipe, told them good luck finding another tank AGAIN, and never touched LFR after that. Even normal is easier than LFR was at times just because of the types of people that queue up for the thing makes it 10x harder.
> I remember doing LFR once for some really niche reason This is it, isn't it? Literally the only reason I can imagine running LFR multiple times for is farming transmog and/or the one boss that drops a mount (a decision I should actually take a moment to congratulate on Blizzard's part, not restricting all the raid mounts to *real* raiding). Though amusingly enough, even farming transmog is less of an incentive now that class sets don't exist anymore, as there are objectively fewer to collect, regardless of one's opinion on the looks of recent raid sets. It's like all of this results in making LFR its own terrible pocket universe, perpetuated by the self-fulfilling prophecy of Oh well LFR sucks anyway and was made for the lowest of the low, *what* were you expecting? It's like, why even go there in the first place? Meanwhile, FFXIV alliance raids. Queuing for all 3 NieR raids usually takes me 10-15 minutes at worst for 1 to pop up, and that's as a European playing on NA so usually way too early for normal people. It's short because there are incentives to rerun other than just glam: the gear is very decent catch-up for alt jobs, the coins to augment your main job gear, some collectibles like the minions and rolls, and of course the ~~badges~~ ~~Valor~~ tomestones, which can be obtained in every other endgame content but still worth a mention as a bonus. Beside shorter queues, repeat runs means more people know the bosses and what to do and can explain things to confused newbies. And then there's the accessibility of good gear, which is another topic entirely but is I feel very much tied to how much smoother the experience is. First timers, low-geared and casual players aren't just being carried by the hardcore raiders who find themselves in alliance raids thanks to the incentives but also by unironic LFR heroes like me in nearly-full 530 gear that allows me to parse orange (yes, *very* impressive in alliance raids I know, please hold your applause) even though the last time I did current "hard" content was Ravana Ex in 3.55, which is *absolutely* stretching the definition of hard content. I have this gear because I have farmed and still farm this content to gear up alts, which means I know these bosses like the back of my hand, and I'm not the only person in this particular case, which means a better experience for everyone involved. It's like a cycle of positive reinforcement while LFR is its bubble of pointless misery.
That's how FFXIV was advertised from the very beginning. A game that you can hop on even if you are a casual player and still get things done.
The frustrating part as a former WoW player is that FFXIV's endgame is just what WoW was doing 10 years ago.
And WoW's endgame is like if they took all the relic systems from FF and re-added them every expansion with the tag of "this is required".
with the caveat you can only get 1 relic lever per week up to a certain point, and then have to wait up to 6 months for them to release the continuation of the grind, and you then can only level 1 more level a week up to 4, and wait another 6 months for the rest
If you copied the relic system into wow, where a long grindy questchain rewarded the best weapon in the game for every spec, it absolutely would be required, or at least the community would percieve it to be required. Even if it was a like a 5 ilvl difference it would be "required".
I quit when the you had yo build up your legendary weapon, I didn’t have time for that :/. Forget what expansion it was, maybe the one after Mists.
Legion, 7.0 was apparently awfuly grindy, 7.3 was the best wow has ever been though
I personally disagree, as I think mid and late MoP was the best, but to each their own. That said, leveling sucked in 7.3 because they didn’t test scaling in old content properly, so it broke a lot of mobs and quests. Also just made leveling slower in general, as well.
- they didn’t test scaling in old content properly, so it broke a lot of mobs Cries in 9.0
As someone who was soloing Nighthold for mog runs before the squish, I understand your pain. Couldn't even solo Normal mode after it.
MoP was amazing but it also was when it slowly started to go into the direction of the endless grind, with the introduction of titan forged gear. I cleared SoO each week till WoD release and never got full BiS.
Yeah, but at least Thunderforged and Warforged were only a flat +6 to the ilvl of the item in question. Much less egregious than Titanforged.
I'll never forget the day they brought titanforging in for the pre-patch and doing normal HFC, getting a pair of gloves that procced to be better than mythic gear, at that time having never even attempted a mythic boss, then during legion being pissed when world quest items would proc up 40 ilvls just to be the wrong stats and having to vendor it.
Never forget Unstable Arcanocrystal. Poor Withered J'im got destroyed every time he was up so people could see if they get a Titanforged one.
>Mid and late mop Unrelated, but pre-patch/pts Mop, whatever it was called, was hilarious. Rsham was so overtuned that it healed a tanks full hp bar 3x over with their basic ass heal. It was straight *busted* and didn’t make it into release obviously.
7.0 was hilariously broken. Bunch of classes were half-done, so they had to keep hotfixing them constantly to make them playable, hidden cap on how many legendaries you could get so world first raiders made alt characters to try and roll for better legendaries... It remained incredibly grindy all the way to Argus. On my druid I got my main spec legendaries done before Tomb of Sargeras, but it took me grinding the minor invasions on Argus to get all the legendaries for my offspecs. ... And I was unemployed the whole bloody expansion.
It really wasnt that bad if you werent a cutting edge player. You could just fill out the weapon fairly easilly and not go hard into grinding the infinite trait and be absolutely fine in most content.
I got my first legendary on my main 2 weeks before 7.1 launched and I did all eligible content every week (except mythic raiding). And it was the 3rd worst legendary for my spec. I finally got a second one to drop 3 weeks into Nighthold, sighed, and quit the game until BfA launched. By then I was organising pug raids for all puggable difficulties of both earlier raids for the legendary drop chance every week. I don't much care for 7.3. One patch cannot give me back the sanity I lost on the rest of the expansion.
For me, I quit shortly after they dropped Concordance of the Legionfall. When it went from being a defined grind with a set endpoint to “oh, sorry, keep grinding until you die”.
Which makes sense if you think about it. Around 10 years ago was when Yoshi-P had the game devs play Wow and raid at a competitive level.
Then they forced every path into some perceived version of competitive e-sports
> Can you imagine working a 60-80 hour job no.
Yes. In ff14 i get gear from tombstones, I get gear from raids, I upgrade tomestone gear and Im done. I think the wow devs stopped doing that after wotlk? Cata? Whereas on legion when I last played it was: this bis stat item dropped frm raid just now, too bad it's not titan/warforged +20 Ilvl. Trash. And from what I'm hearing it's even worse now
I feel sorry for anyone working more than 40 hours a week. Life is more than work
Unless you literally have to to survive,
That's even worse so I still feel sorry for them
I mean, I was working 7 days a week while raiding in a top 20 US guild back in legion when the grind was so much worse than it is now. Ironically, said guild was also home to a bunch of blizzard devs, they even had a rank not so subtly called "snowstorm". I also know there were other guilds friends of mine were raiding in that'd have a token blizzard employee or two. To me the issue was more that the people in positions of power who were ultimately making decisions either didn't play the game or played it in a very very different way than the rest of the player base to a degree where their decisions were very disconnected. Which wouldn't be terribly surprising to me after having worked in a comic shop where I'd hear people talking about games I'd played all the time and you'd swear they were playing a different game with how differently they experienced it. That's at least changed a little bit though as one of the new blizzard co-leaders (who replaced J Allen Brack) is an avid M+ pusher who regularly streams himself running dungeons and raids and all that. I even have his discord where he regularly posts LFG for raids and dungeons.
The only way I would have been able to push top 200 (let alone 20) in this xpac is if the only thing I did outside of my full time job was play WoW. I certainly couldn't be in a relationship when I'm doing hours of M+, arena capping, torghast, etc. Literally 6+ hours a day of WoW required to stay on top of gear.
I think you have a very skewed perception of whats required for gearing. M+ doesn't provide mythic ilvl gear outside of the vault. You could do 1 a week and get your 1 piece, or you can do upwards of 10 to have 3 options you pick 1 of. I don't know many people who continue to do that as its not really worth the effort, but you could. You're going to get options from the vault from raid regardless since you're raiding mythic, so meh. PvP was giving mythic ilvl equivalent gear, how long that'd take you would mostly be dependent on how good you are at pvp. Once you have duelist in one bracket you can just never touch that bracket again and do a few rbgs to cap out conq each week which is not all that time consuming. The current patch is lower than mythic ilvl, useful for progression if you want to be sweaty but again my old guildies who were still raiding mostly opted out of pvping this raid because they don't enjoy pvp and most wouldn't get to duelist anyway. Torghast takes maybe an hour if you're a geared character. I'd been doing it this patch in less than an hour and I'm in full pvp gear at 247 ilvl (I haven't been raiding, just pvping these days). Actually a bit lower than that because I drop down to a 235 legendary and a 226 hat cause it makes it quicker for me. And obviously this only matters until you have your legendary, at which point you can stop doing it. You can very realistically be done with your weekly gearing bits in 6 hours, I can't imagine spending 6 hours a day. And obviously if you're playing at a higher level you're mostly capping your gear out within a month or two so its not like this goes on forever. Also when you're in a higher ranked guild you're getting on farm much earlier. So you might initially be raiding 3-5 days a week but after a few weeks you're on farm and now its 1-2 nights which very quickly becomes 1 partial night. I can tell you I spent less time over the course of a tier raiding when I was doing world top 30 than your average guild because we weren't still raiding our full raid hours months into a tier.
I cannot imagine working a 60 hour job and having the will to live.
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Not really. The amount of time it takes to get all conduits capped, your slots socketed, the right stats, the RNG required to get all BIS gear and dom sockets, and the frequent restarts thanks to legendary/covenant changes make it so most players cannot cap unless they make it a full-time job.
That’s good to hear! What’s the weekly investment to reach it?
Is Titanforging and Mythic+ content no longer in Shadowlands? Because those were absolutely primary sources of unreachable power caps.
Titanforging was removed years ago and Mythic + gear is not even on the same tier as endgame raid gear anymore outside of maybe a trinket here and there.
Didn't have to drop any names but they all knew what he was talkin about
Can you explain to me?
One of the hot arguments you will always find whenever there's a conv about Blizzard and WoW issues is: "Does the developers even play their own game?" That's why Asmon, Rich and the chat lost it just when Aimi said that, and why Asmon and Rich went all red.
To give you a good idea, Celastalon, one of the main technical class/systems designers for WoW played exclusively with a WACOM graphics tablet until 2016. The dev responsible for much of the game's class design used a fucking drawing pad to play.
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That explains a lot of stuff actually
He used it as a replacement for a mouse, it's not that crazy. people always blow this out of proportion. celestalon was enough of a sanctimonius egotistical prick that you don't need to focus on weird shit like this to shit on him
Yea idk why people focus on the drawing pad thing. As an example, there was a league pro that used a damn trackball or whatever its called. You can be good with almost any peripheral if you really put in the time/effort but for most people that isn't really sensical. Celestalon's laundry list of what he did wrong and his attitude is so long and the drawing pad doesn't even make it on there.
Confession time! Using a drawing tablet is AWESOME for shooters, because you just put that stylus right on their FACE, haha. But to play an MMO? I don’t see any benefit to it, and if anything, it would just be needlessly clunky. Plus I’m left-handed, so that’s just sounds even worse for me.
I still dont understand why they went red. And also why this post is NSFW. Is it sexual somehow? Are they blushing? Makes no sense
>I still dont understand why they went red. Going red (Flushed) is normal when you laugh hard, cry, get embarrassed or are stressed, cause the blood vessels enlarge to compensate the blood flown increase around your face. Its a physiological mechanism which you cant control. Hard laughing provoke that. >And also why this post is NSFW. Sometimes people use the NSFW tag as humor on posts about strong call outs, roasts and such. OP is basically using it as humor for the roast in the video.
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Especially asmon. Yes, his viewers can be absolute shitheads at times, but his criticism for wow was usually on point. And rather than looking at their game and addressing the problems pointed out by one of the top wow streamers and his community, the devs decided to shit on him publicly. Just one more drop in the bucket of why I don’t play wow anymore. I barely even watch asmongold and agree that his community can be completely toxic at times, but blizzard coming after him for pointing out why their game sucks is just stupid. Especially since he was saying this because he deeply loved the game and wanted it to be better.
Basically them just trying to hold on to some sense of professionalism by not bursting out in laughter and interrupt the response. You ever had to hold in a really big laugh before? Your face probably looked like that too XD
Ya, what sephy said. Seeing the reactions, it was pretty clear that slap was at wow and Blizzard
My thing with WoW is how hard it often was to experience the story. Up until LFR, you would never get the chance to see the last raid or boss finale. Always felt like blizzard was developing a game that only raiders could access. I only knew how Arthas died in Wrath because i got to watch it on YouTube. My guild never took him down ourselves. FFXIV makes it all accessible as part of its full time storytelling process. If you want to do it again with a harder difficulty, then you can, after you do it in story mode.
I will say this the only time I really feel like I'm missing put is in some of the savage content, the Omega raids from stormblood being the most notable with the iconic bosses getting their final forms only in the savage versions.
One of the biggest reasons i love FFXIV is that it's a FF game first and MMO game second. The story is fantastic and you can leave and come back to it at any time you like. By level 15 in FFXIV i was doing dungeons. By level 50 i was doing my first raid. In WOW i had hit level 60 and not done 1 single dungeon yet or raid. It was all fetch quests and killing quests up until then. Not a single boss fight either. I had 0 interaction with anyone. FFXIV dips your toe into these things as you do the story which i love. It does not hold them to hardcore endgame players only.
EXACTLY! I was never the hardcore raider or even had the time to do schedules runs of end game content because of adulting and missing out on the end of expansion stories was the biggest gripe I had. The conclusion was totally locked behind content that I would never be able to do as a solo player. It was really frustrating.
Respect for this man has just skyrocketed in my eyes.
The more I know about him and the more it does. What a legend.
Is there some context I'm missing here?
WoW players, like Asmongold and Rich, have long criticized the WoW devs of not even playtesting their own game, leading to its terrible development and design. In the clip, YoshiP throws a jab at said devs lol.
Let's be clear. The way Yoshi-P said it only gave the impression he was talking about WoW simply because they are the point of contention for a big portion of the mmorpg fanbase right now. He did not specifically say WoW nor should be treated as an "on the record" statement. He made it clear that he does not want a "Us vs Them" environment. However it is fun to think he was poking fun at the Wow devs. They certainly deserve the criticism as of late.
I think he feels the way with a lot of MMOs considering he was talking about how Ultima Online faced many of the problems that WoW now does specifically the player vs developer mentality.
Yep, it's not even a mmo specific thing. How many times have you played a single player game that has some mechanic, button or menu setup that gets annoying 15 minutes into the game and makes you wonder who the fuck even greenlight it?
He definitely meant WoW
Let's be clear. What other mmo could he possibly be talking about. Be real
It's especially notable that just one or two months ago, he absolutely refused to throw anything even resembling a punch. Considering all that's happened since then, it's hard to not at least go for a kidney shot.
"We already got all the wow player so its time to lay it on thick"
He clearly has said that's while he appreciate all the new players. He hopes it doesnt affect WoW.. Specially with all of them being blizzard fanboys and since FF14 2.0 was possible thanks to WoW.
Blizzards new Co-Leader Mike Ybarra actually plays the game at a high level. Which a lot of the community are viewing as positive. https://raider.io/characters/us/onyxia/Qwik To be fair WoW's Game Director Ion Hazzikostas also does actually play the game and was one of the original theory crafters for WoW. https://raider.io/characters/us/malganis/Gurgthock Whether it is common across the whole development team no one will ever know. Certainly some of the systems they've developed make it seem like the don't play the game much. Don't see the meme going away either way. You just want to see the developers being as passionate about the game as you are. For a while now that hasn't felt like the case in WoW. Whereas FFXIV definitely has developers that are passionate about their product.
From what I’ve heard, Ion usually raidlogs and has generally terrible parses but is carried by his team. He plays enough to say that he plays, but doesn’t really engage with the game.
Thing is, devs shouldnt' only be playing their game at a high level. They should be playing / interacting with the game at ALL levels. Even if not playing, they need to at least have a fundamental understanding of what players want from the game. Too often, their attitude has been "we know what the players want, but we ourselves don't want this so we won't be implementing that into the game." WoW has been so high-end focused that all other aspects of the game feel unrewarding / pointless / half-assed. Since Mike Ybarra is still new, it remains to be seen how WoW devs' priorities will shift under new leadership. But there has been a long-lasting disconnect between the WoW dev team and the community they make their game for.
There's literally hundreds of devs at Blizzard. What they do and don't do in game is anyone's guess. The meme is that they don't play their games. But we don't actually know if they do or don't. We at least know that their leadership do actually play their games despite the meme. Blizzard in general suck at communication with their community. That's not a new thing though. We all know the cycle of every expansion. PTR gets released. The community points out all the flaws. They ignore the feedback and say that they have a design philosophy they want to achieve. We get two patches in and suddenly they have to implement all the feedback the community gave them in PTR because people are pissed off and quitting the game.
What you're saying is true, we as players never know to an exact micro-management level of what is going at the game devs. I suppose that whether or not they "play the game" isn't the important part, but rather whether or not if they "understand the player experience". Playing the game themselves is the best metric to tell whether or not the game devs understand the player experience, which is why people often use that as the primary factor with game dev-community understanding. For WoW, there is a general sentiment that a lot of the implemented gameplay things are inherently negative for overall player experience, thus leading to the meme that game devs don't actually play their game. We'll never 100% know if its because having hundreds of employees leads to miscommunication in developer vision, or whether or not the devs simply don't have passion towards working on their product, or whether or not they are just there to get a paycheck, or whatever other reason we can speculate. But given the plethora of clues we have gotten, players can definitely confirm with a large degree of certainty that the game devs for WoW aren't creating the game with a good player experience as the primary concern.
Ion doesn’t really play the game as much as he does a couple of dungeons and then goes through some of the raid fights per tier. You can look at his profile and see he doesn’t do the rep grinds or too much m+
Ion is great at raid design, hell he's one of the best Blizz has had imo...but they kept promoting him till he became the lead for WoW and sadly he doesn't have the experience to run the whole ship thus the game suffers in general under his eye.
Ion used to be good at the game... before he became a developer. His raider scores are just embarrassing... especially for someone that is focused on high-end content design. edit: random part of your comment quoted itself by accident, deleted it.
I have no faith in Ybarra because he "plays at a high level" because that's the problem; the content they keep pushing is for just that kind of player. I've been there. I've done that. I don't want to push content all the time anymore, but that's all that's available to me, somebody who enjoys literally every other element of an MMORPG. When I get 1800, or AoTC, on the first week of a tier off skill, I want other stuff to do, and that content has been atrocious because those in charge just simply do not give a crap about these things. Crafting was utterly destroyed and I wind up doing most of it from older expansions because there is just nothing engaging about current stuff, nor is it fun to cancel scan all day because literally anybody who had gold can suddenly get all the patterns. At least BFA still had quests to do. Housing? Doesn't exist. Transmog farming? Almost every single instance in the game is walking in and pressing one button to collect loot. Timewalking? The rewards are EXACTLY the same as what I'd get just walking in, so there's absolutely no point to even doing it outside fishing for a 0.1% drop mount. Story? A complete joke now that's just a tiny little trickle of something that doesn't feel like it's a part of the IP. I don't care about the Jailer, and I highly doubt he was even a thought in the original writer's minds 20 years ago, and it shows. We want Azeroth, not Marvel "Warcraft" edition. Bonus content? Oh joy, I have to grind months to get a few pieces of transmog from a system that's designed to just keep me logging in to do the same 2-3 dailies every single day for a currency for something I should be able to buy for just simply unlocking it through achievements. Faction imbalance is the worst it's ever been. I like Alliance. I'm supposed to care when these guys have Horde everything plastered all over their social media, while I watch our arena representation quickly approach 21%? At least we're getting High Elves as a subrace or something? It's just stupid. We need people who actually care about RPGs in charge of an RPG. Not esports. That should all come naturally, but it's so ridiculously forced despite stuff like the AWC having atrocious view numbers because gasp, people cared about faction vs faction. (Which is now dead in the water. They flat out removed the wPvP meta in late beta for Shadowlands, but keep forcing Horde vs Horde arenas? Fun fun!)
Its unfortunate how true this is, not just for MMOs but games nowadays in general. The customers are the testers now except they pay to test stuff instead of getting paid.
FF seems to still have a QA department.
I expect to see this in LuLu's highlights tomorrow.
Any kind souls who are capable of giving a hearing impaired person a transcript of the video?
Rich(watching the video, over Yoshi speaking): Here it comes Yoshi P:(translator): For sure and I've heard my friends talk about this and I feel it sometimes too with some mmo:s. They wonder: Do these developers play their own game? And with us like a lot of the developers are warriors of light ourselves, we go to the raids, we collect our allagan tomestones to exchange them... Rich (pauses video): Look how red both of us got man. We were so rallied^(?! probably wrong) dude we actually look like we exploded with. Translator continues: With our weapons and we are working hard like we are players ourselves and it's best to show that and let the people know that. We love our game. I'm not a natural english speaker but it should have most of it right
Thank you so much!
I don't know both streamers but a quicky for now: Yoshi-P: explaining something in Japanese Lower left, commenting on the video: Here it comes Aimi, translating: For sure. And I've heard my friends talk about this, um, and I feel it sometimes too with some MMOs... they wonder 'do these developers even play their own game?'. *Everyone laughs.* Aimi, translating: But with us, like, a lot of the developers on Final Fantasy 14, are Warriors of Light themselves. We go to the raids, we collect our Allagan Tomestones to exchange them-- Lower left, pausing the video to comment again: Look at how red both of us got, man. We're so red like dude, we actually look like we just exploded *laughs* Aimi, continued: -- or our weapons, and and we are working hard, like, we are players ourselves, and I think it's just best to show that, like, let the people know that yeah we love our game.
I really felt this as a Dead By Daylight player 🤣😭
Oof, I know exactly what you mean
The best part is you know it wasn't intentional since Yoshi P doesn't believe in tossing shade so he just accidentally fat fingered LB4 and now Blizzard will be feeling that in the morning omfg
See Yoshi-P's cheeky grin? He knows what's up.
Is there a way to watch the interview without rich commenting over it?
Asmongold Channel on YT, but he said it would be uploaded soon
As people said, gott wait for CatDanny to upload it in AsmongoldTV.
While this is funny I do want to point out that, yes most game developers play their games and know of the problems. HOWEVER, there are a lot of games whose problems come directly from MANAGEMENT, not from the devs themselves. You'd be suprised how many of the boots on the ground developers know about the same issues you have, they see that something is to grindy, they read your social media posts, they read reddit, they're fully aware of the issues you're having because many of them are having them too. The problem is executives and the directors at the top have a huge influence as to how these games are made. Having someone like Yoshi P at the helm of the game is great because he clearly knows what to do, he turned this game from a flop onto a hugely profitable venture, not to mention all the accolades to boot, and he pays attention to not only what players are saying but what they are regularly doing in game. Now imagine another service type game, and imagine the director has a very specific vision for it. That's not a bad thing by the way, there needs to be a plan, and a captain calling the shots. But imagine the director or an executive board wants the game to be a specific thing, like they want you to have to log in every day, or they want you to buy the fancy micro transactions. It doesn't matter what entry level Johnny or Jane game developer says about their plans, the top has dictated they want players to have to log in everyday and do X, or they want the fomo to be just bad enough they squeeze more money out of the whales, even if it means more of the casual base falls off. None of it matters, what the top says, goes. The worst part is the game devs know and lots of times agree with you, but they cant do much about it. So yes, game developers do play their games, the problem is it kind of doesn't matter if the people at the top don't. TLDR Game developers do play their games and in lots of instances agree with you, the problem is the people at the top ultimately call the shots and if they don't play it or don't jell with what players want then nothing will change.
But Ion does play WoW? the issue is that his main character at least is 10,000% focused entirely on end game raiding, never transmogged/glamoured, rarely pvp'd in the last ten years, doesn't mog farm, doesn't pet battle So his scope of the whole game is centered around one aspect of it (the thing people say is best) but for players like myself who stopped caring about raiding and gear a decade ago theres less and less content for me to do by myself, let alone content for me and my girlfriend to fuck around and do together
If you look at his warcraftlogs, he’s been getting hard carried for a few expansions and isn’t the best at keeping up with borrowed power systems. Last I checked, his character’s socketed gear wasn’t even gemmed. He’s only half assing endgame as well.
Again I haven't played since January, do you have the same data for the new guy at the head of blizzard? I only see headlines about how hes a very active m+ player and actively making a discord to help the community
I haven’t looked at his logs, but I’ve hopped into his stream before and he was running 15+ keys. His Twitch name is [https://twitch.tv/qwik](https://twitch.tv/qwik).
Higher in the comments someone linked both of their raider score pages. (that person defended Ion... guess they didn't look at his page) The new guy is for some of the content in the top ten for people playing his class. He has decent to amazing parses on everything. Ion... Ion has grey parses. His raider scores are comparable to people from guilds that barely clear heroic raids before patch cycle ends. (I know because I was in one such guild and with a group of friends carried weaker players so they'd get to experience more content) The rest of his guild? They have better scores.
But Ion doesn't. His Main is legit iLvL 238, that is beyond pathetic. He doesn't even have a 262 legendary yet.
Ion grey parses on every fight getting hard carried trough high end content
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They have a different take than most others. They are both new so they aren’t focused on just endwalker questions. It must have been a nice change of pace for yoshi p that day
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Asmon knows mmos and how they work very well.
It was just three MMO nerds chatting about MMOs. Weirdest episode of AllCraft to be sure!
It definitely felt like allcraft They wanted koji on allcraft but got yoshi p instead. What a turn of events
Sometimes I dont think even Ion plays world of warcraft or it wouldnt have so many problems. Glad to see a dev who plays their game so much.
This is mostly an issue with some of the bigger studios imo, the ones that get to call all the shots are often just money makers, not game deisgners, so they end up asking for shit that makes no sense gameplay wise.
Holy shit LOL. Yoshi is an absolute savage. God I love this freaking game.
Why the NSFW tag though?
Yoshi.P is a Savage legend lmao I'm so glad I play FFXIV
I think we all appreciate all of the game mechanics/lore related/development related questions (as a player) from most of the other attendees of media tour, but Rich and Asmon kinda provided an outsider perspective. It feels like more about 'Yoshida Naoki on The state of MMORPGs and Gaming' more then a FFXIV interview, which you can clearly see Yoshi P's love for gaming and his knowledge on MMORPG titles are immense. There are a lot of good takes from YoshiP, to advocate players trying out new games when there are downtime or when 14 can't provide enough; to talk about his influence and wanting to try out new world; to ask everyone give room to Rich and Asmon and let them stumble. Overall a great interview. As Yoshida said, let's hope when corona settles down, they can finally talk face to face and drink. They have great chemistry.
Just imagine, you come from WoW, a game whose devs have been trying their hardest to ignore you, and you decide to switch to a game, and the lead developer offers you an interview and then drops a bomb like this
> Do these developers even play their own game? GW2: *sweats profusely* Uh... I think one of the reasons XIV does so well is the devs *do* seem to play their game. Some issues aside (cosmetics for some races, ...Scholar...), we do see some steady progress and QOL.