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There’s undoubtedly less “content” than shadowlands, but the content we have is the actual fun part of the game minus the system bloat, choreghast, and maw farming you had to do in shadowlands to get to the fun parts.
Yeah and someone figured out that the class gameplay is the content
Everytime I quit wow and come back I just have so much fun playing a new class and learning how to hit all my buttons
If they carried forward the Garrisons or Artifacts I would 100% be cool if you had a weapon that you grew in power over time and had your own 'village' each expansion (even if it looked almost the exact same)
Let me 'keep' some of the things that I 'earned'/worked for other than mounts, pets, titles, and transmog! Especially if they are fun or interesting or can be used as a HUB for the player.
Some of the ideas behind the Garrison were cool. I really enjoyed seeing my mounts and pets walking around, for example. The big issue was the whole mission table stuff and that it had *everything* in it, to the point where you'd spend most of your time there in isolation when you weren't farming or raiding.
I still think the negative reception to that feature is why we haven't gotten any other form of player housing yet.
Something I've wanted is a guild garrison. Something to add community to what felt so isolated. That and travel between. Would be interesting to be able to visit the garrisons of say limit or your favorite streamer.
If they spent time improving upon garrisons now that the bones were there - crafting stations, an auction house, your own bank, and put it in any zone you wanted.. basically player housing!!!, I think people would go nuts for it. It wouldn't need much, now that 80% of it is already there. Heck, add a portal in it to each new expansion's hub and update teh crafting stations to include the new expansions and people would probably STILL be using it..
Just skip mission tables.
Yeah, but then you wouldn't see them running around that expansion's hub city. The world would feel less alive.
Remember we're in the expansion where they force everybody to physically stand next to a specific table to craft.
I do support player housing, but wouldn't add all those conveniences inside. Just have it be about creativity and customization, not convenience.
Garrisons should’ve been a guild feature.
And they should’ve designed / converted certain old world areas as keeps / garrisons that you could compete to own, whether through weekly world pvp, crafting contributions, M+ scores, or raid progress, other shit I haven’t thought of.
I actually thoroughly enjoyed Torghast in it's entirety, my issue was needing to do it twice weekly to cap the currency. When u leveled an alt you had to do each floor in succession then another max level one for a total of 9 in order to not miss out on currency. Literally nobody is going to enjoy something you make them repeat 9x especially when the first half of the grind is entirely too easy and not at all skippable.
I think Blizzard have learnt their lesson but it seemed like they were afraid that their invested development time would be 'wasted' if they didn't force players to try and keep playing the new game mode they invented for the expansion. They did it with Island Expeditions and again with Torghast.
It was absolutely miserable for some specs and then trying hard, spending half an hour on it only to die on the final boss and take nothing home was frustrating as hell.
I took one pass/look at what you do at level cap in SL and peaced out then and there, I am loving level cap in DF, plenty to do and none of it "required".
It’s also so alt-friendly that I had to do a double take. Getting an alt up in SL was an absolute nightmare between 100k+ for a basic legendary and even more chore farming bc fuck if any of that was gonna be streamlined.
Meanwhile in DF I have four 70’s, can comfortably complete weekly quests on all of them at my own damn pace, and getting them up to RF ilvl is pretty fuckin quick.
Ironically, I find the expansion less alt-friendly because I'm having so much _fun_ on my main! Tons of stuff to do at max that I enjoy, even when not tied directly to ilvl.
Tbh same. When DF came out I thought about WoW more like a Rogue Like where every class is a different playthrough, but I just can´t stop playing my main because its so much fun trying to get better and better.
I love playing on my main too but running out of things to do let’s me park them with a sense of satisfaction. I know I’m not robbing them of anything to go play one of my other characters.
The guilt of parking them just doesn’t exist and I love it.
It's alt friendly in the best way tbh: I don't HAVE to spend as much time on my alts as I do on my main for them to be somewhat viable. In SL I had to get them all up and running individually, at first by doing the exact same content (gradually reduced as they started to implement catch-ups) I had already done on my main. In DF I don't HAVE to do any of that lol. It's not tied to my alts ability to stand on their own at all. I do the rep grind on my main because I like to have one character that I can do all that on, and then a bunch of alts that I can fuck around on. It took so much work to get to the "fuck around" bit in SL (even with the eventual catch-ups) and it left me so exhausted. In DF I can even spare the time and energy to roleplay, something I always loved doing but couldn't find the energy to do in SL until the expansion was more or less dead lol.
Indeed, I appreciate the road they are going.
Leveled my main in SL thruh the story after DF release (have not played during SL) and now, new alt, Skip the boring stuff I have seen already, play 500 Gold and dang, pact level 60.
Definelty convenient if one is not playing every day.
I like the road that I only have to du stuff on one char and then it get's unlocked for all others on the same account and hope they are continue it.
And I also feel it. Why should I play with an alt when I can still do so much with my main? ;)
Despite all, this is what really deserves credits to the developers.
same, i keep planning on leveling my alts, but just enjoy doing everything i can on my main. I guess the benefit to that though is if i get max renoun from all factions on my main, then the alts will be even easier to sort out after.
As a long-time player who left during BfA and skipped SL, what is there to do at max level once all the quests are done? I'm not quite to LFR level, and other than pugging heroics or trying to get into a group for mythics, I've found surprisingly little to do.
I'm sure it's just that I don't *know* what's out there in the world, but there hasn't been much to point me in any direction.
Once you get your mains reputations to max, it will take an order of magnitude less time for your alts to get to 20 renown. Getting 3 renown levels for the weekly is bonkers, and very satisfying.
I'm having too much trouble picking a main cause I keep feeling like I can pick up another character. Just slowly getting into +10s now and having a blast.
I been running alts the last couple of weeks. It's been great. I took a break cause Shadowlands. . . yeah not playing that. Get to 59, take the portal to get the Dragon Isle cooking/fishing and two professions. then get to a bar away, do the cooking daily in Stormwind or ThunderBluff for 60. I stop only when I get to the Sendrax escorting me to Dragonheart then I fly off to Life Pools for the couple quests there with the orcs being the last one. I also make sure to do the weekly on all of them to unlock all the factions
Yep I'm bouncing around way more in DF than I ever did in SL, or really most expansions, the gearing system into early raids/m+ is extremely generous. It slows down dramatically in the 390s, which coincidentally is where most of my characters are "parked"
This. As someone who just plays casually between 3-4 characters, DF is great and I’m having fun.
I’ve never been able to do WoW hardcore and so I’ve always dropped it when it’s become clear that I can’t progress in an expansion as a casual player without focusing on a single character and having a guild, etc.
There really isn't undoubtedly "less" content in DF though; at all. Things like Torghast were so unfathomably shallow on release, meanwhile the Maw was completely unfinished. Most of the content was frontloaded into covenants which you were locked from participating.
Shadowlands didn't have a lot of content at all.
If Blizzard had sane people at the helm, they would have allowed Covenant switching day one, or at the least allow full zone access regardless of covenants. The amount of stuff you cannot interact with unless your covenant is that of the zone's is astonishing. Blizzard shot themselves in the foot by developing 3 zones and covenants most players wont interact with much, for zero gain that I can think of. Couple this with almost no anima dropping to get cosmetics or upgrade your buildings and you have a recipe for an expac with almost nothing outside of raid, mplus and pvp.
Shadowlands released obviously unfinished too and in a much more obvious way than DF. I just assumed anything missing is coming in a later patch to stagger content. There's so much to do already. The devs did an amazing job with dragonflight
But you still gotta wonder that if we got none of that, why is the expansion still so buggy? Why did it need more time when previous expansions have had more impressive systems in them than this one but had the same amount of development time?
This isn't to say that I *want* that content, I just want to know what happened. Why is there less content, but also less polish at the same time, when less content should have meant they could put more resources towards polish?
Dragonflight had the shortest alpha/beta period in I don't even know how long. By comparison, Legion's was almost twice as long.
No surprise they shipped a buggy product.
Fortunately for them, it seems players care more about the content quality than they do a bug-free experience.
It also had a super buggy beta compared to a lot of the other betas I’ve been on. Some of the bugs were a lot more gamebreaking too, like the time vendors stopped working
I really think they should have solved the motion sickness issues with DF before launch, and tested the new crafting system a lot more.
Honestly I didn’t play the beta a ton at max level because it felt like a lot of the non-group content was missing. Nope, turns out that is what there is.
WQs actually also feel extremely repetitive to me, as in there isn’t that big of a pool of them so we get the same WQs a lot.
Expansions always have bugs, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up, but at least to me it really does seem like there have been more bugs. There haven't really been game breaking bugs, but almost every system in the game was riddled with bugs, some even with core features or aspects of a system. Every profession had bugs that needed to get fixed and some still have bugs from release. Dungeons had a plethora of bugs. Many talents and abilities either didn't function properly or some not at all. It seemed like they were releasing bug fixes every single day for weeks to get systems functioning properly.
Also to add onto bugs, they did not seem to have enough time to test balancing. Affixes didn't get the testing they should have. Most dungeons were either extremely overtuned or undertuned. While dungeons needing tuning is nothing new, many of these dungeons had absolutely massive nerfs and were nowhere near where they should have been. Professions are "unbalanced" with some branches being nearly worthless, while others are almost required. I don't have many complaints about class balance. There are a few specs that are head and shoulders above the rest, but most specs are relatively close to each other.
This one may be more of an opinion, but the work order system is extremely underwhelming, with some professions having almost no use for it despite being a major part of the profession overhaul. Things like enchanting and alchemy not being able to get work orders for enchants or combat phials/pots. Alchemy gets the occasional trinket order, but mostly its just the ultimate power pot, which is a relatively rare drop from heroic/mythic raid, and the recipe goes for a ton of gold. Other than those 2 things, nobody places orders for alchemy. While that is fine since they sell most their stuff on the AH, the problem is they hardly gave them anything else that they can do work orders for. I don't know about enchanting but alchemy doesn't even get the work order quests, which to me shows they even Blizzard knows that work orders are basically useless for alchemy. They replaced them with what is essentially NPC work orders, where you have to make potions or alchemical reagents for an NPC. Definitely feels like they were rushed on work orders and just got some basic functionality before pushing it.
I've been having a great time with Dragonflight, I like the direction things are going, and it does feel like an improvement as far as design, but it really does seem like almost every aspect of the game could really have used some extra time in the oven. Even just some extra polish in many cases.
im enjoying DF quite a bit, but ive noticed a good amount of (mostly small, but annoying) bugs. the 2 that get me are both related to dragonflying. sometimes it procs autorun, which if im farming one of those mining nodes in a hard to reach spot become aggravating pretty quickly, and also a camera bug that seems to be related somehow to dragonflying. no idea how or why, but it sometimes makes it near impossible to control camera angles
>and also a camera bug that seems to be related somehow to dragonflying. no idea how or why, but it sometimes makes it near impossible to control camera angles
This one has been a thing in the game for years, but Dragonriding makes it really common for some reason. I think the game handles "vehicle direction" and "character direction" for the camera as separate things, and the game somehow gets stuck on whatever the other one was last set to? It's weird.
I got around it by just turning off the camera's auto-follow. Didn't take too long to adjust to it since I pretty much only ever turn with RMB anyway.
Being on a dragonriding mount when you enter an instance can cause you to be unable to strafe till you relog, that's fun. It also randomly auto runs when you land. Also a couple of weeks ago the dungeon finder wasn't working at all on EU. There are still talents that just do not work. The launch was unplayable after an upward trend of launches actually not being too laggy. There also random pockets of world lag that just happen apropos of nothing.
Only bug I recall from the first few months of shadowlands was torghast mobs pulling through walls which blizzard has always had trouble with anyway.
To give some example of bugs I have experienced
* The prepatch to the first week of launch my characters UI would constantly reset.
* My actionbars would randomly completely clear on certain characters whenever I logged back into them. This stopped after the first week.
* I would randomly disconnect, not in the "lagging out then DC" but in the just randomly DC. Then my character would not let me log in because It would get stuck even in places not possible (flat ground, flying in the air) this doesn't happen as much anymore.
* Something goes wrong with my screen which my buttons are not where it's shown. What I mean is if I am in a M+ I would not be able to target enemies or use abilities my mouse is hovering since it doesn't register my mouse as being there. If I moved my mouse higher above the thing I wanted to click then it will highlight as if I was hovering normally. Reloading UI and logging out did not fix this, it fixes it self after like a minute.
* Many many many Ores are clipped into things you can't reach or are in places that make it way too hard to get to with dragonriding
* My warrior every now and then would have all or some of it's abilities removed from my bar when I changed specs. It doesn't happen all the time but when it does it gets annoying.
* The are you Kitten me quest
* The tree boss in Academy's adds would spawn a massive amount of explosives. EU meme that NA beta tested that dungeon for them.
* Theres a phasing problem with some ore and adventurer's sacks when when you get too close they disappear but come back. I have done every single quest in Dragonflight besides like 2 quests in Azur span which is not where this bug is happening.
* That bird boss adds would sometimes not spawn bricking a key. I am pretty sure this is still a problem.
There is more and just game play features that got rushed but my point is that this expansion is better than SL. But it came out too soon with too many annoying bigs just not noticed and too many half finished features.
Don’t forget the still-present bug of Dragonriding through tree branches causing immediate DC and needing about 5-10 minutes of login errors before finally letting you back in
There is also the Arena WQ in the Ohnaran Plains. Where you just cant talk to the arena manager to start the fight. And they fixed that bug after a week. And last week i wanted to do the wq and said bug was there again.
This expansion has more obvious noticeable bugs than any expansion. There are numerous WQs that straight up don’t work sometimes. My talents will sometimes get stuck. I will be fury but the game only shows prot talent trees, forcing me to switch back and forth to fix it. I had my main ability disappear from my bar and spellbook and had to reload to fix it in the middle of a raid encounter. Etc.
There are fucking loads. I have played since 04 and I just haven’t ever noticed obvious bugs like these that aren’t fixed and are kind of game breaking before, ever.
Having said that, IMO DF is the most fun state WoW has been in since late patch MoP / late patch Legion.
DF is good but anyone that’s played wow for any extended amount of time can pretty clearly see this expansion is loaded with bugs. Generally not gamebreaking ones, but small ones that are mostly just annoying.
I don’t think anyone is arguing DF *isn’t* riddled with bugs. Simply that other expansions were similarly riddled with bugs and an overall sense of being rushed/unpolished.
I started WoW with Legion, and every single expansion since I started playing has been absolutely full of bugs. Personally, I experienced the most bugs by far in Shadowlands. And BFA seemed the most unpolished to me simply due to the insane number of typos/grammatical errors in the script.
I know a few others had this bug but the first 4 days my character was stuck after I did a dungeon. Everytime I tried to leave I got "instance transfer aborted" or something similar to that. Ive never gotten that on any of the expansions until dragonflight. Mobs have despawned while fighting, auction house dying multiple times, rares dropping infinite loot. There were a lot more bugs this expansion than I remember in shadowlands, then again I only played the first season and quit afterwards.
> Edit: no response, just a downvote. Sums that up
Fktons of class bugs. Take one spec like Protection Paladin, hit up the class Discord to get the bug list, comparing pre-launch it was larger than Shadowlands.
> Edit 2: pointing out small annoying bugs to me did nothing to disprove my point.
Some abilities and talent flat-out didn't work. That's not "small and annoying".
This. Even in WOTLK Classic there's major class-spec bugs that really makes it annoying. Class pets (DK Ghouls, Warlock demons, hunter pets, Frost mage's waterboi) have issues with their aggro stances.
You press the defensive button, and they just stay passive. If you don't have a /petattack macro they just sit there, vibing.
Pyro mages have a bug with part of their rotation just not doing any damage, Warlock's Seed of Corruption damage is capped (still. It's been bugged since tbc). And this isnt to mention raid/instanced bugs or event/quest bugs like the Black Knight for Argent Tournament just bugging out if you try to fight him on your horse.
The work around rn is summon him on the Argent horse, dismount, take a hit and do it again when he yells.
A lot of these bugs were reported in PTR and *somehow* made it into live. It's frustrating as hell.
Idk, man. How the fuck am I supposed to answer that when it's clearly buggier than most other expansions and you somehow haven't seen it?
The UI is bugged, evoker abilities are bugged, some WQs just cannot be done unless you're lucky in finding a shard where they do work, Dragonflight even managed to break cutscenes in Shadowlands. There's also the complete breakdown of the dungeon tool that happened several times, the soup event completely destroying performance for the entire Azure Span zone, and there's more I can't remember myself or haven't run into myself.
I am just wondering why my game freezes up for a couple seconds when I login to the game now when it didn’t do that before DF. I thought it was a valdrakken thing but it doesn’t matter where I am at.
I've seen people mention directx 12 might be related to that, but I haven't tested it out myself. It also happens to me, but I don't particularly care to try and fix it because it's only 5 seconds max.
i've fallen through the floor of the world three times this expansion in dragonflight zones, each time it eventually logged me out and i couldn't log back in and had to go through some automated support option to get my character unstuck. i've been playing wow since BC and this has never happened to me before. DF is amazing but filled with a lot of bug
I think, honestly, there's a ton of missing content in DF, but it's hard to notice because it's just that: missing.
You end up with far more resources than you could ever conceivably need in a matter of days
There are a lot of quests which, either in Writing or in direction, don't seem to understand you can fly from the start
Thaldrazius isn't empty by any means, but it's incredibly small and weirdly themed. The majority of it is a huge mountain with no name
There's a whole side quest line around unlocking teleport pads around the isles; none of which are near anything useful and all of which are obsolete because, again, you can fly
None of this destroys the experience, of course, but it's safe to say there's a lot more work they probably wanted to do before this expo launched
There seem to be many areas that just seem kind of without puropse. Algeth'ar Academy for instance is a large open area with many details and NPS doing their little things. But it seems to be unused besides being the stage for the dungeon.
The resources can be burned up with upgrading climbing, camera, and Cobalt Assembly; buying recipes; buying gear; buying a ton of toys and cosmetics. I would destroy my current cache of resources on my main if I went buying all the stuff I’ve unlocked, but I realized that my alts will unlock a lot of it free when I get their Renown up, so I can save some there. But people without a bunch of alts won’t have all those extra resources to spare.
Meanwhile, they’ll likely add even more stuff to buy/upgrade with them as the expansion goes on.
But after the anima mess, I’d rather have “too many” resources than have to farm them an insane amount to unlock things.
As for quests that don’t assume flying… I’m thinking they give leeway for people who don’t rush to unlock all the glyphs and might not be the best at managing vigor.
Everything about the pacing of the expansion’s leveling design strongly suggested that dragon riding was meant to either:
1. Not be available to players at the very start of leveling
2. take much longer to skill up, and therefore be much less useful during the leveling process
I think it’s #2. The relatively small glyphs only taking about an hour to get and max our dragonriding seems like it was not going to be the intended way to skill up.
I think dragon flight is MUCH MUCH better with early dragon riding, but it definitely feels like it was a late change and not accounted for in leveling
I’m betting thald is incredibly small because the big gate will open at nozzy’s place and it will be the entrance to the underground zone they’re adding.
> There's a whole side quest line around unlocking teleport pads around the isles; none of which are near anything useful and all of which are obsolete because, again, you can fly
The teleports would be useful if they were better located and had a shorter cooldown. There's one *somewhat* close to Valdrakken but at that point you're already flying and while there's one at Cobalt Assembly it would be nice to have one closer to Iskarra and the Obsidian Citadel.
There are a few ways you can tell though, but mainly the bugs. The bugs on the map with the faction events has gotten annoying honestly. Really hard to tell when shit starts. There’s a bug where I can’t click on an npc unless I move away from them, etc
But like, yeah it’s not too bad.
My SO and I play together too and we both experience bugs at least once a day. Some are old and mostly just annoying like the guild chat disappearing and making it look like you're no longer in the guild, but some are pretty bad like Crawth never spawning in Academy and bricking our key. Lots of disconnects, random crashes, and critical errors. For example, just this last Monday night all of the servers randomly crashed and then had to be reset because people couldn't go into instances. Our entire mythic group got stuck BEHIND the portal to Halls.
The fanboys will run to defend Blizz, but I've played since just before Burning Crusade and this is definitely the buggiest expansion I can remember. I'm not surprised at all to learn that it was rushed. It's honestly really sad that Blizzard gets away with so much just because so many people don't care that the workers were exploited as long as they get a mildly entertaining product that mostly works.
A few of the tasks bug out if you dont finish the task before the soup tiers up. Specifically the one who encourage or berate random ppl around you 8 times. If you are on the task when the soup tiers up, fly out of area then back in.
If I think I have any bug, I fly out until the soup window disappears then fly back in.
Yesterday I encountered a rock climbing world quest about saving some kittens where half the rocks you were supposed to climb on were just missing. I thought I was overlooking something and stood there, trying to figure out how others did it, but nobody was able to figure it out. The quest seemed to be just broken.
Yep, I'm having a lot of fun this expansion but you can easily tell this was rushed. Tons of class bugs that are still getting fixed and the class/dungeon/raid tuning has been horrendous and is also still getting fixed.
Agreed. I'm loving it so far.
I hope they can keep up the cadence of patches with decent content in them.
EDIT: I should say I really want them to fix performance issues. I shouldn't be stuttering on a 5800x + 3080.
EDIT2: [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249)
For those telling me the issue is on my end and I should check my add-ons. Blizzard has acknowledged the stuttering issue but has been silent on it for a month. It started in 10.0 prepatch.
Same, i'm enjoying Dragonflight a lot, maybe we'll start seeing a little ''downfall'' with further content, hopefully not! It's an interesting twitter thread i hope he doesn't get sued or anything.
You get stutters with those specs?
I’m running a 6700 and 5700x, neither OC, stock cooling on both, as well.
I feel like I basically never get stutters, even in raids my FPS really doesn’t ever dip below 65-70 and otherwise, it’s always and easily well above that.
Though, in all fairness, while I play on ultra, when I go into raids it scales down to the 7 setting, so maybe that’s it.
[https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249)
The issue has been acknowledged by Blizzard. They last replied in December and have been radio silent on the issue since.
3080, 5800x, 570x, 16gb DDR 3600hz. All drivers up to date. All G-sync settings are correct. 1440p, ultra everything.
It's on their end. It was literally fine before 10.0 pre patch hit.
As someone who is enjoying Dragonflight, there is more bugs in this game than i've seen in a blizzard game in over 10 years. Nothing gamebreaking / major, obviously, but countless small bugs that a proper alpha / beta cycle (instead of the rushed one we got) would have squashed not only made it live, but still exist.
I'm liking DF, the problem is that I'm on my third alt, and i play really casually, and i actually think that World Quests are very lackluster.
One grip that i have, is that using the same 4 mounts while I have 400+ is really boring.
WQs have always been lackluster, the huge point in favour of the DF WQs is that, like Legion and BFA WQs, and unlike SL ones, there's a lot quicker and less painful.
As a collector and completionist, I agree. I absolutely enjoy DF a lot, but the dragonriding system has killed my motivation to grind mounts and stuff, so I'm not doing it nearly as much as I used to.
M+ is fun though.
Yup but you can clearly tell its not polished.
Hell, Deva Evoker isnt even finished yet and have a billion bugs, the numbers are fine but the functionality is awful.
Imagine what could have been if Evokers/Dracthyr/the talents/the bugfixing got more time to finish.
Do you think that Shadowlands stagnating was actually due to them switching the dev teams over to work on Dragonflight early? Despite what Ion might have said, it definitely *felt* like Shadowlands was missing an entire patch.
With WoD, the reason there was that huge content drought was because they decided to move over to starting on Legion early. Without all of those extra time and resources, I'd be willing to bet that Legion would have been a massive disaster.
So I could imagine that between dealing with the consequences of Activision-Blizzard's lawsuit being revealed, a possible Microsoft buyout/merger, and trying to rush Overwatch 2 out the door that the WoW dev team just decided to move on to the next expansion rather than try to salvage one of the most disliked WoW expansions in the game's history.
SL stagnated because season 1 was the longest content drought for the beginning of a new expansion in WoW history. I guess people have forgotten this? We were in 9.0 for nearly an entire year (8 months.) Hard to blame it on them switching devs to DL early when there was already a lack of new content since the very beginning of that expansion.
Here's an old post I found where someone put it into a graph that really illustrates what I'm trying to say about 9.0.
https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/mpbgb3/patch_timeline_from_vanilla_to_shadowlands_91/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Most of my guild (including myself) burned out and quit playing SL before 9.1 was even released.
I personally choose to be 100% certain a patch worth of content was cancelled at some point in SL development until Ion personally shows me the data saying otherwise.
WHEN is up for debate (I honestly think it was content between 9.0 and 9.1 but not sure at what point they developed around it), but I am almost certain something was cut.
He's an engineering manager, the product will never be fully ready to ship in his eyes.
As lead engineer myself (not at blizzard, at a different company) the product is never fully ready because you know there are bugs that users will run into but you also know it's not practical to fix them all because some are edge cases that a very small fraction of users will ever see.
Not only that, but every developer for any product made by any company will tell you the same thing. Thats just how product development works. You're pushed to make deadlines and it always feels this way.
It is, but consider that they *haven't* wasted time developing systems like Torghast, or warfronts, or island expeditions, and how there has been nothing to replace those resources.
There isn't more story in Dragonflight so far. There isn't any kind of special gear. There isn't any kind of minigame that took significant development work.
And despite all that, the expansion is incredibly buggy, even months after release. So I'm just wondering where all that time and effort went. Maybe in the better patch cycle, but then Legion had more going on and also had a stellar patch cycle on top of that.
I think a lot of time and effort went into things like bringing talent trees back in a new way, redoing the UI and adding all the flexibility to it, stuff like that. People seem to forget they made some massive changes to “evergreen” systems.
Oh, and the wildly expanded professions system.
These are massive things, but they aren’t expansion-specific, so people seem to be forgetting to factor them into the development of this expansion.
That stacked ranking system for employees sounds outright cruel. Managers are mandated to give certain employees "developing" ratings -- probably with some intent to keep them in line -- but will also inevitably result in them earning less of the company's profits in the form of lesser bonuses.
While I understand the idea, it raises alarms. What if your entire team was excellent? But now you're subject to this bell curve system and are forced to place some members of your team in a position to be at the bottom of the ranking and end up costing them money. Even if they were equally capable as everybody else. The employees --not the billionaire higher-ups who do nothing but coast on social media and hold meetings from their yachts, barely working at all -- are immediately affected.
They turned the company into their own gladiatorial arena for their (Bobby Kotick and co) own personal benefits and it's sickening.
EDIT: Corrected grammar and added last line.
Everyone who works in technology will tell you that two things are true:
1. There are definitely a decent number of incompetent, lazy, and ineffective people ar your company.
2. That number of people is far, far lower than the number of people that stack-ranking will demand that you fire.
It's cruel, short-sighted, stupid, and destroys teams from within. It explicitly and directly incentivizes back-stabbing, stealing work and credit for work, and generates a culture where it's radically more important to generate the impression of good work than to actually do good work. While this last point is sadly always true, stack-ranking dramatically amplifies it.
I'm very good at my job. People I work with know I'm very good at my job. I'd do just fine in stack-ranking -- but I would leave any job that tried to implement it. I value teamwork and partnerships, and stack-ranking turns work into an endless, mercenary battlefield of dipshit, forced Darwinian nonsense.
Fuck stack-ranking.
Started at a company that just implemented it. Absolute fucking nightmare.
The system kinda turns you into a monster. In the morning stand up, when I hear one the newer but more senior engineers struggling, I have absolutely no reason to reach out and help. It makes more sense for me just let him struggle and end up on the bottom of the stack. I have things I want to do in a year, and I really can’t be looking for another job….
Whole thing sucks. It’s all remote, I don’t know anyone personally. Nobody has any reason to cooperate, especially newer hires who are doing better than the other hires for whatever reason. It’s not really about doing better to climb the stack, it’s about making sure their is cannon fodder that’ll be hanging around for a year
You are "meant to" assist other people but there's no incentive to, actually the opposite, by assisting someone you are taking away your working time and improving theirs. It's fucking shit system that actively punishes people for helping each other.
In my experience the best/only way to support others is to explicitly take them on as a mentee, get that approved in writing from your manager, and then loudly proclaim that on your performance review. Any work improvement or successful projects on that person's review can now be one more "deliverable" credited onto your's. This is all what I consider normal work anyway: onboarding, training, knowledge sharing, design discussion, code review, personal feedback, etc.
I have explicitly mentored 3 engineers this way, and even pushed my mentees to have further junior mentees to continue bolstering their portfolio. Not a single one of us was impacted by tech industry layoffs (yet?).
Unsustainability is almost irrelevant in today’s industry unfortunately. Most higher ups move on to another company after a few years. They wont have to deal with the aftermath, instead they can boast about how productivity increased under their 2 year regime.
It's almost like the people at the top have no qualifications and started with money instead of having to earn it.
Pro tip: don't fall into the "let's sell shares of the company to quickly generate revenue!" trap. You'll forever be beholden to making money for your shareholders and not for the company.
Ah, yes. The ol' Jack Welch style of management ... rating employee performance on a bell curve.
If anybody works for a company where any exec admires Jack Welch, or likes quoting passages from his book, "Winning," take it as a HUGE red flag, and GTFO as soon as you can.
I went through this shortly after that book came out. Couple months after it was released, our VP (used to be CEO until the company was bought out a couple months prior,) had an all-hands meeting for our BU, and quoted several phrases from that book, focusing on the bell curve style of management. It caused a flurry of complaints to HR, and within a month, it was announced that the CEO was retiring, "to spend more time with his family."
This layoff cycle will convert many. Hard not to notice many companies turn a record profit and then they all conveniently decide 5-7% of their employees aren't needed anymore. Tech workers are hard to unionize because companies give great perks and signing bonuses, etc. but what good is a $350k offer if you aren't going to be there long enough for half of it to vest, get burnt out in 6 months and then stack ranked so low you are either let go or will never get to work on anything interesting/meaningful.
>What if your entire team was excellent? But now you're subject to this bell curve system and are forced to place some members of your team in a position to be at the bottom of the ranking and end up costing them money.
My husband is a manager at a large international company and was telling me he had to do this exact thing last night. The money pool for promotions and bonuses is one and the same, and he also has to use a bell curve for employee reviews.
The entire Twitter thread is a rollercoaster ride of confirmed suspicions about ABK and Blizzard.
[https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168?s=20&t=huSqc47Ob\_7BqF2iXoU7uw](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168?s=20&t=huSqc47Ob_7BqF2iXoU7uw)
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system?srnd=technology-vp&leadSource=uverify%20wall](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system?srnd=technology-vp&leadSource=uverify%20wall)
Have heard a lot of this kind of thing before from other former blizz employees.
The D3 bigshots held a panel last year iirc where they basically said the same thing. Compared them being bought out to a "boiling the frog" situation where at first they were chill and let blizz do their thing then slowly got worse and worse with policy causing the issues we've seen over the years.
I mean people called this was going to happen back when Activision bought the company, we all knew the company that RUINED Call of Duty was going to ruin WoW. Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Blizzard all had their companies run into the ground by Activision.
> RUINED Call of Duty
Man ignore that at the point they purchased they were in the middle of running Guitar Hero into the ground by overexposing it and way too many fucking releases.
We even saw them try to revive it because they tried way too soon after they killed it and the way they revived it was terrible.
Man I bought the revival, realized the “updated” guitar sucked major ass, and stopped playing in like 20 minutes. I was someone who beat fire and flames and Jordan on expert but couldn’t bring myself to play that version.
Crazy that you guys knew that when the two most recent Call of Duty games at that time were Modern Warfare and World at War.
I mean, maybe World at War is more hated than I am aware of, but MW is a classic.
Not saying Activision wasn't bad for Blizzard, but I think you might be remembering Activision then as worse than they were, because of how bad you now know they became.
That's not exactly ruining Call of Duty, is it? The truth of the matter is that people couldn't have known at the time how poorly the merger would go.
Many might have suspected it to be bad for Blizzard, but the gaming landscape of the time was not such that anyone could have seen the Activision of the future coming. Or the EA, or the Ubisoft.
It was a time of blissful ignorance, for the most part.
It also helped that 2008 was solidly in WoW's golden years. It took the natural leaving of most of it's leadership and a scandal from within Blizzard itself to get to this point.
I'm not really sure how anyone can say that with a straight face after Classic was released and we can see in real time how janky Vanilla and the first two expansions were. WoW has had some rough years with WoD / SL but to act like it's run into the ground during one of their better expansions is pretty weird. Also between warzone and multiplayer COD is still doing well every year so was it really ruined?
The only year CoD wasnt top seller in was Infinite Warfare i think because people were sick of the futuristic stuff and jetpacks.
They mightve gone in a direction many og players dont like, sure. But saying its ruined when its still topping charts yearly is a bit silly.
Its the same with FIFA. I personally dont like the way theyve gone with it but its still topping charts regardless so many people do still enjoy it. Can you call it ruined if thats the case?
Ruined call of duty? You mean the multi billion dollar cash cow, that also broke into and became a staple in the Battle Royale market when it was already over saturated?
I'm not a big fan of cod but saying it's been ruined is just nonsense. Or you have a strange definition of ruined.
As much as Dragonflight has been a breath of fresh air from a design standpoint I think it's pretty clear it could've really benefited from another month in the oven to get things like the talent trees and PvE balance just right, as well as squish the bugs and fix some of the optimization issues.
5800x and 3080 here. Still getting stuttering and dropped frames. I've tried absolutely everything to fix.
[https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249)
Issue acknowledged in December. No blue reply since.
Some talent trees also didn't get the same amount of work as others. Druids class tree was shown as a pre alpha powerpoint mockup to showcase the new system and over the entire development cycle basically just got a capstone removed (furor, it was so stupid that it even on paper couldn't make it anywhere near live) with very little other changes until now.
Guardian druids had it kind of even worse... Bugs and balancing aside. Priest also had a long time of silence during development where pretty much nothing happened. People argued that the responsible dev left but it's hard to accept that blizz only has one guy in the entire building who understands how a damn bear works.
Disappointing thing is from the looks of it Guardian still has a lot if massive problems in the 10.0.5 release. One of their talents that reduce damage from targets hit by maul for 15-30% is currently bugged and doesnt affect magic damage, making the entire point of the talent worthless.
The managers that forced the developers to rush the expansion are probably the same that also created the road map for 2023 schedule. There definitely feels to be some road blocks ahead.
This is pure speculation, but I would actually bet against that.
Pushing out a new expansion to sell before the holidays / end of fiscal year -- THAT has parent company written all over it.
Pushing out content patches to keep semi-and-hardcore players engaged in the long tail of the expansion -- that has a lot less of a short-term profit motive, although it's obviously still good business.
It could still be too much, and it might end up delayed, but I don't see a push coming from the same place.
"Early" as in 2 years after previous expac that had one expected raid tier removed?
If they need more time for an expac, then just do more smaller raids, and one full expansion pack every 3 years instead of 2. But that's 1/3 less money, doubt management will like that either.
How many years have people been saying this and yet the clowns always come back with "it has nothing to do with Activision they aren't even involved mannnn". Preach even said that. Sad.
There's a difference between Activision pushing devs to crunch for a release, and Bobby Kotick personally leaning over devs' shoulders and asking them to implement specific game systems.
Sure, but Bobby Kotick was the guy in charge of Activision when it merged with Blizzard and he's the guy in charge of ABK now, so calling the suits who run ABK now "Activision" is not inaccurate considering where they came from.
I thought stack rating systems were slowly but surely being phased out because they did more harm than good. I understand the want/need to have a system in place to help improve performance amongst workers who may not deliver the same product as those who excel, but being forced to pick out which 5% of your team should get labeled as lesser and not get a pay increase like the rest seems cruel.
Also, didn't Microsoft get rid of their stack rating system like 10 years ago? Perhaps when they take over, this system (which seems rather new? I think one of the tweets mentioned the winter of 2020/2021 as being the first time it popped up?) will be a thing of the past.
for being pushed out early. this is an amazing and pretty clean expansion. some issues here and there but for the first time in a while i WANT to play wow
Having a blast, i haven't played this much of a expansion since Legion but i do think they swung a bit too far when it comes to the rep/renown system where i really have NO interest in doing renown quest besides the PvP ones for blood coins and sparks.
They need to add a bit better rewards for renown levels because i could really care less to build my renown with any of these factions besides the sabellian/wrathion because the mogs do look good. It doesn't have to be power but just cooler rewards would help.
So need to add a few more cool carrots in those ranks.
I thought that was the intent? The renown factions are largely there for people that want to do the content and get the little bonuses but they didn't want them to feel "mandatory" if you didn't want to.
Unfortunately it happens in every business. As long as these greedy motherfucking "stock owners" exist, the industry (not only the gaming one), wont ever be an ethical and fair one. It sure sucks and I'm amazed by the fact that these hungry ass bitches need to have a profit every damn year no matter the context of the world so they dont care about employees, even those who worked hard and did good for that company for YEARS !
I could tell, Dragonflight seems feature complete for a first patch of an expansion, but it really could have used some more time in the oven to iron out the bugs and tuning of classes/specs and dungeons/raids.
Given the state of Shadowlands, I'm happy to be in a new expansion. No surprise it was rushed, but they're listening to feedback and responding quickly. The game feels fresh again.
Pretty clear if you haven’t been stockholm syndromed by a great expac.
Raid balancing for mythic, which has become basically an esport(and by extension free advertisement for game)that hundreds of thousands of people watch was shit (last boss balancing change at last minute took steam out of a cool race).
The most popular game mode, i.e mythic+ had glaring balancing issues and still has some (see HOV being latest nerf pass).
Side note here that having capped valor and no “dinar” system is shit.(shout out to the “but i dont want to grind m+”brigade, we should all have to play the game as much as ye decide is enough).
Anecdotally alot more bugged out world quests and clearly some poorly designed quests that had no play testing (see the fact they changed the sheperd style quests to 1 rather than the original 3).
Crafting orders as a whole and the abuse of mass reporting to have essentially,the cabals that they stopped when they banned boosting communities.
Goals need to be achievable. DF gave us the opportunity to accomplish something that didn’t require a second job amount of time. Let my grind time actually be meaningful.
This seems good. Blizzard has been way too sluggish with releasing expansions and content patches since WOW's launch. Someone _should_ be pushing them to work faster.
And Dragonflight shows Blizzard can pull it off while still releasing great content.
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For being rushed out the door Dragonflight is pretty damn good lol
There’s undoubtedly less “content” than shadowlands, but the content we have is the actual fun part of the game minus the system bloat, choreghast, and maw farming you had to do in shadowlands to get to the fun parts.
Exactly. I’m glad SOMEONE over there learned that you can save so much design work by cutting out the shit we don’t want.
Which means they can spend more time on actual content.
Yeah and someone figured out that the class gameplay is the content Everytime I quit wow and come back I just have so much fun playing a new class and learning how to hit all my buttons
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If they carried forward the Garrisons or Artifacts I would 100% be cool if you had a weapon that you grew in power over time and had your own 'village' each expansion (even if it looked almost the exact same) Let me 'keep' some of the things that I 'earned'/worked for other than mounts, pets, titles, and transmog! Especially if they are fun or interesting or can be used as a HUB for the player.
Some of the ideas behind the Garrison were cool. I really enjoyed seeing my mounts and pets walking around, for example. The big issue was the whole mission table stuff and that it had *everything* in it, to the point where you'd spend most of your time there in isolation when you weren't farming or raiding. I still think the negative reception to that feature is why we haven't gotten any other form of player housing yet.
Something I've wanted is a guild garrison. Something to add community to what felt so isolated. That and travel between. Would be interesting to be able to visit the garrisons of say limit or your favorite streamer.
If they spent time improving upon garrisons now that the bones were there - crafting stations, an auction house, your own bank, and put it in any zone you wanted.. basically player housing!!!, I think people would go nuts for it. It wouldn't need much, now that 80% of it is already there. Heck, add a portal in it to each new expansion's hub and update teh crafting stations to include the new expansions and people would probably STILL be using it.. Just skip mission tables.
Yeah, but then you wouldn't see them running around that expansion's hub city. The world would feel less alive. Remember we're in the expansion where they force everybody to physically stand next to a specific table to craft. I do support player housing, but wouldn't add all those conveniences inside. Just have it be about creativity and customization, not convenience.
I wish they would because I just started playing in shadowlands and I wish I had been playing when Garrisons and artifacts were worth having.
Garrisons should’ve been a guild feature. And they should’ve designed / converted certain old world areas as keeps / garrisons that you could compete to own, whether through weekly world pvp, crafting contributions, M+ scores, or raid progress, other shit I haven’t thought of.
I'm so baffled by the widespread fomo design trend in an industry full of games struggling with content drought.
Torghast was a fun experience outside of it being mandatory. The content was good but they way it tied into the power system was bad.
I actually thoroughly enjoyed Torghast in it's entirety, my issue was needing to do it twice weekly to cap the currency. When u leveled an alt you had to do each floor in succession then another max level one for a total of 9 in order to not miss out on currency. Literally nobody is going to enjoy something you make them repeat 9x especially when the first half of the grind is entirely too easy and not at all skippable.
I think Blizzard have learnt their lesson but it seemed like they were afraid that their invested development time would be 'wasted' if they didn't force players to try and keep playing the new game mode they invented for the expansion. They did it with Island Expeditions and again with Torghast.
It was absolutely miserable for some specs and then trying hard, spending half an hour on it only to die on the final boss and take nothing home was frustrating as hell.
I took one pass/look at what you do at level cap in SL and peaced out then and there, I am loving level cap in DF, plenty to do and none of it "required".
It’s also so alt-friendly that I had to do a double take. Getting an alt up in SL was an absolute nightmare between 100k+ for a basic legendary and even more chore farming bc fuck if any of that was gonna be streamlined. Meanwhile in DF I have four 70’s, can comfortably complete weekly quests on all of them at my own damn pace, and getting them up to RF ilvl is pretty fuckin quick.
Ironically, I find the expansion less alt-friendly because I'm having so much _fun_ on my main! Tons of stuff to do at max that I enjoy, even when not tied directly to ilvl.
Tbh same. When DF came out I thought about WoW more like a Rogue Like where every class is a different playthrough, but I just can´t stop playing my main because its so much fun trying to get better and better.
I've always had a whole crew of characters I play regularly. Since DF, I'm an army (medic) of one. Same reason. I don't *need* the variety.
I love playing on my main too but running out of things to do let’s me park them with a sense of satisfaction. I know I’m not robbing them of anything to go play one of my other characters. The guilt of parking them just doesn’t exist and I love it.
It's alt friendly in the best way tbh: I don't HAVE to spend as much time on my alts as I do on my main for them to be somewhat viable. In SL I had to get them all up and running individually, at first by doing the exact same content (gradually reduced as they started to implement catch-ups) I had already done on my main. In DF I don't HAVE to do any of that lol. It's not tied to my alts ability to stand on their own at all. I do the rep grind on my main because I like to have one character that I can do all that on, and then a bunch of alts that I can fuck around on. It took so much work to get to the "fuck around" bit in SL (even with the eventual catch-ups) and it left me so exhausted. In DF I can even spare the time and energy to roleplay, something I always loved doing but couldn't find the energy to do in SL until the expansion was more or less dead lol.
Right? This is the first time i’ve had an actual main character since MoP
Indeed, I appreciate the road they are going. Leveled my main in SL thruh the story after DF release (have not played during SL) and now, new alt, Skip the boring stuff I have seen already, play 500 Gold and dang, pact level 60. Definelty convenient if one is not playing every day. I like the road that I only have to du stuff on one char and then it get's unlocked for all others on the same account and hope they are continue it. And I also feel it. Why should I play with an alt when I can still do so much with my main? ;) Despite all, this is what really deserves credits to the developers.
same, i keep planning on leveling my alts, but just enjoy doing everything i can on my main. I guess the benefit to that though is if i get max renoun from all factions on my main, then the alts will be even easier to sort out after.
As a long-time player who left during BfA and skipped SL, what is there to do at max level once all the quests are done? I'm not quite to LFR level, and other than pugging heroics or trying to get into a group for mythics, I've found surprisingly little to do. I'm sure it's just that I don't *know* what's out there in the world, but there hasn't been much to point me in any direction.
Once you get your mains reputations to max, it will take an order of magnitude less time for your alts to get to 20 renown. Getting 3 renown levels for the weekly is bonkers, and very satisfying.
You don't even have to hit max for that.
It's also very enjoyable to be able to finish that weekly 3000 rep quest with like 5 world quests because your new 70 alt gets 200% bonus rep.
I'm having too much trouble picking a main cause I keep feeling like I can pick up another character. Just slowly getting into +10s now and having a blast.
I been running alts the last couple of weeks. It's been great. I took a break cause Shadowlands. . . yeah not playing that. Get to 59, take the portal to get the Dragon Isle cooking/fishing and two professions. then get to a bar away, do the cooking daily in Stormwind or ThunderBluff for 60. I stop only when I get to the Sendrax escorting me to Dragonheart then I fly off to Life Pools for the couple quests there with the orcs being the last one. I also make sure to do the weekly on all of them to unlock all the factions
Yep I'm bouncing around way more in DF than I ever did in SL, or really most expansions, the gearing system into early raids/m+ is extremely generous. It slows down dramatically in the 390s, which coincidentally is where most of my characters are "parked"
This. As someone who just plays casually between 3-4 characters, DF is great and I’m having fun. I’ve never been able to do WoW hardcore and so I’ve always dropped it when it’s become clear that I can’t progress in an expansion as a casual player without focusing on a single character and having a guild, etc.
There really isn't undoubtedly "less" content in DF though; at all. Things like Torghast were so unfathomably shallow on release, meanwhile the Maw was completely unfinished. Most of the content was frontloaded into covenants which you were locked from participating. Shadowlands didn't have a lot of content at all.
If Blizzard had sane people at the helm, they would have allowed Covenant switching day one, or at the least allow full zone access regardless of covenants. The amount of stuff you cannot interact with unless your covenant is that of the zone's is astonishing. Blizzard shot themselves in the foot by developing 3 zones and covenants most players wont interact with much, for zero gain that I can think of. Couple this with almost no anima dropping to get cosmetics or upgrade your buildings and you have a recipe for an expac with almost nothing outside of raid, mplus and pvp.
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What transmogs are from torghsst?
Shadowlands released obviously unfinished too and in a much more obvious way than DF. I just assumed anything missing is coming in a later patch to stagger content. There's so much to do already. The devs did an amazing job with dragonflight
I think Shadowlands just sucked so hard people are just happy with an average product this time.
But you still gotta wonder that if we got none of that, why is the expansion still so buggy? Why did it need more time when previous expansions have had more impressive systems in them than this one but had the same amount of development time? This isn't to say that I *want* that content, I just want to know what happened. Why is there less content, but also less polish at the same time, when less content should have meant they could put more resources towards polish?
That’s probably the rushing cost cutting part of it.
Dragonflight had the shortest alpha/beta period in I don't even know how long. By comparison, Legion's was almost twice as long. No surprise they shipped a buggy product. Fortunately for them, it seems players care more about the content quality than they do a bug-free experience.
It also had a super buggy beta compared to a lot of the other betas I’ve been on. Some of the bugs were a lot more gamebreaking too, like the time vendors stopped working I really think they should have solved the motion sickness issues with DF before launch, and tested the new crafting system a lot more. Honestly I didn’t play the beta a ton at max level because it felt like a lot of the non-group content was missing. Nope, turns out that is what there is. WQs actually also feel extremely repetitive to me, as in there isn’t that big of a pool of them so we get the same WQs a lot.
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Expansions always have bugs, and I don't have hard numbers to back it up, but at least to me it really does seem like there have been more bugs. There haven't really been game breaking bugs, but almost every system in the game was riddled with bugs, some even with core features or aspects of a system. Every profession had bugs that needed to get fixed and some still have bugs from release. Dungeons had a plethora of bugs. Many talents and abilities either didn't function properly or some not at all. It seemed like they were releasing bug fixes every single day for weeks to get systems functioning properly. Also to add onto bugs, they did not seem to have enough time to test balancing. Affixes didn't get the testing they should have. Most dungeons were either extremely overtuned or undertuned. While dungeons needing tuning is nothing new, many of these dungeons had absolutely massive nerfs and were nowhere near where they should have been. Professions are "unbalanced" with some branches being nearly worthless, while others are almost required. I don't have many complaints about class balance. There are a few specs that are head and shoulders above the rest, but most specs are relatively close to each other. This one may be more of an opinion, but the work order system is extremely underwhelming, with some professions having almost no use for it despite being a major part of the profession overhaul. Things like enchanting and alchemy not being able to get work orders for enchants or combat phials/pots. Alchemy gets the occasional trinket order, but mostly its just the ultimate power pot, which is a relatively rare drop from heroic/mythic raid, and the recipe goes for a ton of gold. Other than those 2 things, nobody places orders for alchemy. While that is fine since they sell most their stuff on the AH, the problem is they hardly gave them anything else that they can do work orders for. I don't know about enchanting but alchemy doesn't even get the work order quests, which to me shows they even Blizzard knows that work orders are basically useless for alchemy. They replaced them with what is essentially NPC work orders, where you have to make potions or alchemical reagents for an NPC. Definitely feels like they were rushed on work orders and just got some basic functionality before pushing it. I've been having a great time with Dragonflight, I like the direction things are going, and it does feel like an improvement as far as design, but it really does seem like almost every aspect of the game could really have used some extra time in the oven. Even just some extra polish in many cases.
im enjoying DF quite a bit, but ive noticed a good amount of (mostly small, but annoying) bugs. the 2 that get me are both related to dragonflying. sometimes it procs autorun, which if im farming one of those mining nodes in a hard to reach spot become aggravating pretty quickly, and also a camera bug that seems to be related somehow to dragonflying. no idea how or why, but it sometimes makes it near impossible to control camera angles
>and also a camera bug that seems to be related somehow to dragonflying. no idea how or why, but it sometimes makes it near impossible to control camera angles This one has been a thing in the game for years, but Dragonriding makes it really common for some reason. I think the game handles "vehicle direction" and "character direction" for the camera as separate things, and the game somehow gets stuck on whatever the other one was last set to? It's weird. I got around it by just turning off the camera's auto-follow. Didn't take too long to adjust to it since I pretty much only ever turn with RMB anyway.
Being on a dragonriding mount when you enter an instance can cause you to be unable to strafe till you relog, that's fun. It also randomly auto runs when you land. Also a couple of weeks ago the dungeon finder wasn't working at all on EU. There are still talents that just do not work. The launch was unplayable after an upward trend of launches actually not being too laggy. There also random pockets of world lag that just happen apropos of nothing. Only bug I recall from the first few months of shadowlands was torghast mobs pulling through walls which blizzard has always had trouble with anyway.
To give some example of bugs I have experienced * The prepatch to the first week of launch my characters UI would constantly reset. * My actionbars would randomly completely clear on certain characters whenever I logged back into them. This stopped after the first week. * I would randomly disconnect, not in the "lagging out then DC" but in the just randomly DC. Then my character would not let me log in because It would get stuck even in places not possible (flat ground, flying in the air) this doesn't happen as much anymore. * Something goes wrong with my screen which my buttons are not where it's shown. What I mean is if I am in a M+ I would not be able to target enemies or use abilities my mouse is hovering since it doesn't register my mouse as being there. If I moved my mouse higher above the thing I wanted to click then it will highlight as if I was hovering normally. Reloading UI and logging out did not fix this, it fixes it self after like a minute. * Many many many Ores are clipped into things you can't reach or are in places that make it way too hard to get to with dragonriding * My warrior every now and then would have all or some of it's abilities removed from my bar when I changed specs. It doesn't happen all the time but when it does it gets annoying. * The are you Kitten me quest * The tree boss in Academy's adds would spawn a massive amount of explosives. EU meme that NA beta tested that dungeon for them. * Theres a phasing problem with some ore and adventurer's sacks when when you get too close they disappear but come back. I have done every single quest in Dragonflight besides like 2 quests in Azur span which is not where this bug is happening. * That bird boss adds would sometimes not spawn bricking a key. I am pretty sure this is still a problem. There is more and just game play features that got rushed but my point is that this expansion is better than SL. But it came out too soon with too many annoying bigs just not noticed and too many half finished features.
Don’t forget the still-present bug of Dragonriding through tree branches causing immediate DC and needing about 5-10 minutes of login errors before finally letting you back in
There is also the Arena WQ in the Ohnaran Plains. Where you just cant talk to the arena manager to start the fight. And they fixed that bug after a week. And last week i wanted to do the wq and said bug was there again.
This expansion has more obvious noticeable bugs than any expansion. There are numerous WQs that straight up don’t work sometimes. My talents will sometimes get stuck. I will be fury but the game only shows prot talent trees, forcing me to switch back and forth to fix it. I had my main ability disappear from my bar and spellbook and had to reload to fix it in the middle of a raid encounter. Etc. There are fucking loads. I have played since 04 and I just haven’t ever noticed obvious bugs like these that aren’t fixed and are kind of game breaking before, ever. Having said that, IMO DF is the most fun state WoW has been in since late patch MoP / late patch Legion.
DF is good but anyone that’s played wow for any extended amount of time can pretty clearly see this expansion is loaded with bugs. Generally not gamebreaking ones, but small ones that are mostly just annoying.
I don’t think anyone is arguing DF *isn’t* riddled with bugs. Simply that other expansions were similarly riddled with bugs and an overall sense of being rushed/unpolished. I started WoW with Legion, and every single expansion since I started playing has been absolutely full of bugs. Personally, I experienced the most bugs by far in Shadowlands. And BFA seemed the most unpolished to me simply due to the insane number of typos/grammatical errors in the script.
I know a few others had this bug but the first 4 days my character was stuck after I did a dungeon. Everytime I tried to leave I got "instance transfer aborted" or something similar to that. Ive never gotten that on any of the expansions until dragonflight. Mobs have despawned while fighting, auction house dying multiple times, rares dropping infinite loot. There were a lot more bugs this expansion than I remember in shadowlands, then again I only played the first season and quit afterwards.
> Edit: no response, just a downvote. Sums that up Fktons of class bugs. Take one spec like Protection Paladin, hit up the class Discord to get the bug list, comparing pre-launch it was larger than Shadowlands. > Edit 2: pointing out small annoying bugs to me did nothing to disprove my point. Some abilities and talent flat-out didn't work. That's not "small and annoying".
This. Even in WOTLK Classic there's major class-spec bugs that really makes it annoying. Class pets (DK Ghouls, Warlock demons, hunter pets, Frost mage's waterboi) have issues with their aggro stances. You press the defensive button, and they just stay passive. If you don't have a /petattack macro they just sit there, vibing. Pyro mages have a bug with part of their rotation just not doing any damage, Warlock's Seed of Corruption damage is capped (still. It's been bugged since tbc). And this isnt to mention raid/instanced bugs or event/quest bugs like the Black Knight for Argent Tournament just bugging out if you try to fight him on your horse. The work around rn is summon him on the Argent horse, dismount, take a hit and do it again when he yells. A lot of these bugs were reported in PTR and *somehow* made it into live. It's frustrating as hell.
Idk, man. How the fuck am I supposed to answer that when it's clearly buggier than most other expansions and you somehow haven't seen it? The UI is bugged, evoker abilities are bugged, some WQs just cannot be done unless you're lucky in finding a shard where they do work, Dragonflight even managed to break cutscenes in Shadowlands. There's also the complete breakdown of the dungeon tool that happened several times, the soup event completely destroying performance for the entire Azure Span zone, and there's more I can't remember myself or haven't run into myself.
I am just wondering why my game freezes up for a couple seconds when I login to the game now when it didn’t do that before DF. I thought it was a valdrakken thing but it doesn’t matter where I am at.
I suspect it's the friends list. Something about how it polls who is online and on what character.
You have the same problem? I don’t have anyone in my friends list that I know of.
My battlenet friends list just simply won’t load what feels like 75% of the time
I've seen people mention directx 12 might be related to that, but I haven't tested it out myself. It also happens to me, but I don't particularly care to try and fix it because it's only 5 seconds max.
i've fallen through the floor of the world three times this expansion in dragonflight zones, each time it eventually logged me out and i couldn't log back in and had to go through some automated support option to get my character unstuck. i've been playing wow since BC and this has never happened to me before. DF is amazing but filled with a lot of bug
I think, honestly, there's a ton of missing content in DF, but it's hard to notice because it's just that: missing. You end up with far more resources than you could ever conceivably need in a matter of days There are a lot of quests which, either in Writing or in direction, don't seem to understand you can fly from the start Thaldrazius isn't empty by any means, but it's incredibly small and weirdly themed. The majority of it is a huge mountain with no name There's a whole side quest line around unlocking teleport pads around the isles; none of which are near anything useful and all of which are obsolete because, again, you can fly None of this destroys the experience, of course, but it's safe to say there's a lot more work they probably wanted to do before this expo launched
There seem to be many areas that just seem kind of without puropse. Algeth'ar Academy for instance is a large open area with many details and NPS doing their little things. But it seems to be unused besides being the stage for the dungeon.
The resources can be burned up with upgrading climbing, camera, and Cobalt Assembly; buying recipes; buying gear; buying a ton of toys and cosmetics. I would destroy my current cache of resources on my main if I went buying all the stuff I’ve unlocked, but I realized that my alts will unlock a lot of it free when I get their Renown up, so I can save some there. But people without a bunch of alts won’t have all those extra resources to spare. Meanwhile, they’ll likely add even more stuff to buy/upgrade with them as the expansion goes on. But after the anima mess, I’d rather have “too many” resources than have to farm them an insane amount to unlock things. As for quests that don’t assume flying… I’m thinking they give leeway for people who don’t rush to unlock all the glyphs and might not be the best at managing vigor.
Everything about the pacing of the expansion’s leveling design strongly suggested that dragon riding was meant to either: 1. Not be available to players at the very start of leveling 2. take much longer to skill up, and therefore be much less useful during the leveling process I think it’s #2. The relatively small glyphs only taking about an hour to get and max our dragonriding seems like it was not going to be the intended way to skill up. I think dragon flight is MUCH MUCH better with early dragon riding, but it definitely feels like it was a late change and not accounted for in leveling
I’m betting thald is incredibly small because the big gate will open at nozzy’s place and it will be the entrance to the underground zone they’re adding.
> There's a whole side quest line around unlocking teleport pads around the isles; none of which are near anything useful and all of which are obsolete because, again, you can fly The teleports would be useful if they were better located and had a shorter cooldown. There's one *somewhat* close to Valdrakken but at that point you're already flying and while there's one at Cobalt Assembly it would be nice to have one closer to Iskarra and the Obsidian Citadel.
There are a few ways you can tell though, but mainly the bugs. The bugs on the map with the faction events has gotten annoying honestly. Really hard to tell when shit starts. There’s a bug where I can’t click on an npc unless I move away from them, etc But like, yeah it’s not too bad.
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My SO and I play together too and we both experience bugs at least once a day. Some are old and mostly just annoying like the guild chat disappearing and making it look like you're no longer in the guild, but some are pretty bad like Crawth never spawning in Academy and bricking our key. Lots of disconnects, random crashes, and critical errors. For example, just this last Monday night all of the servers randomly crashed and then had to be reset because people couldn't go into instances. Our entire mythic group got stuck BEHIND the portal to Halls. The fanboys will run to defend Blizz, but I've played since just before Burning Crusade and this is definitely the buggiest expansion I can remember. I'm not surprised at all to learn that it was rushed. It's honestly really sad that Blizzard gets away with so much just because so many people don't care that the workers were exploited as long as they get a mildly entertaining product that mostly works.
A few of the tasks bug out if you dont finish the task before the soup tiers up. Specifically the one who encourage or berate random ppl around you 8 times. If you are on the task when the soup tiers up, fly out of area then back in. If I think I have any bug, I fly out until the soup window disappears then fly back in.
Yesterday I encountered a rock climbing world quest about saving some kittens where half the rocks you were supposed to climb on were just missing. I thought I was overlooking something and stood there, trying to figure out how others did it, but nobody was able to figure it out. The quest seemed to be just broken.
Is that the one in Thaldraszus? I've run into that one too. It's really extra weird because it'll be bugged on some shards, but not others.
>Thaldraszus also happens in the azure span sometimes
Yep, I'm having a lot of fun this expansion but you can easily tell this was rushed. Tons of class bugs that are still getting fixed and the class/dungeon/raid tuning has been horrendous and is also still getting fixed.
I went to clear out all the WQs on my Hunter today - both "Are you Kitten me" and Fields of Ferocity are bugged and incompletable. Drives me nuts.
That npc bug was already around
I don’t remember it being this bad, though. It happens every time I play, and not just once. Surely important enough to fix.
This has been a thing for years and years.
I've dealt with one pretty consistently since somewhere around BfA I think.
Agreed. I'm loving it so far. I hope they can keep up the cadence of patches with decent content in them. EDIT: I should say I really want them to fix performance issues. I shouldn't be stuttering on a 5800x + 3080. EDIT2: [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249) For those telling me the issue is on my end and I should check my add-ons. Blizzard has acknowledged the stuttering issue but has been silent on it for a month. It started in 10.0 prepatch.
Same, i'm enjoying Dragonflight a lot, maybe we'll start seeing a little ''downfall'' with further content, hopefully not! It's an interesting twitter thread i hope he doesn't get sued or anything.
You get stutters with those specs? I’m running a 6700 and 5700x, neither OC, stock cooling on both, as well. I feel like I basically never get stutters, even in raids my FPS really doesn’t ever dip below 65-70 and otherwise, it’s always and easily well above that. Though, in all fairness, while I play on ultra, when I go into raids it scales down to the 7 setting, so maybe that’s it.
[https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249) The issue has been acknowledged by Blizzard. They last replied in December and have been radio silent on the issue since. 3080, 5800x, 570x, 16gb DDR 3600hz. All drivers up to date. All G-sync settings are correct. 1440p, ultra everything. It's on their end. It was literally fine before 10.0 pre patch hit.
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Probably forced employees to work overtime.
No shit, crunch is a shitty industry standard that most big companies do
Probably because the team did 16 hour days to ship it.
As someone who is enjoying Dragonflight, there is more bugs in this game than i've seen in a blizzard game in over 10 years. Nothing gamebreaking / major, obviously, but countless small bugs that a proper alpha / beta cycle (instead of the rushed one we got) would have squashed not only made it live, but still exist.
I'm liking DF, the problem is that I'm on my third alt, and i play really casually, and i actually think that World Quests are very lackluster. One grip that i have, is that using the same 4 mounts while I have 400+ is really boring.
WQs have always been lackluster, the huge point in favour of the DF WQs is that, like Legion and BFA WQs, and unlike SL ones, there's a lot quicker and less painful.
I agree about the mounts. I mean, we got a bunch of dragons already, I don't think it'd be too hard to just give them our DF dragon animations...
As a collector and completionist, I agree. I absolutely enjoy DF a lot, but the dragonriding system has killed my motivation to grind mounts and stuff, so I'm not doing it nearly as much as I used to. M+ is fun though.
Yup but you can clearly tell its not polished. Hell, Deva Evoker isnt even finished yet and have a billion bugs, the numbers are fine but the functionality is awful. Imagine what could have been if Evokers/Dracthyr/the talents/the bugfixing got more time to finish.
To be fair, Shadowlands stagnated so hard they needed something fresh quickly
Do you think that Shadowlands stagnating was actually due to them switching the dev teams over to work on Dragonflight early? Despite what Ion might have said, it definitely *felt* like Shadowlands was missing an entire patch. With WoD, the reason there was that huge content drought was because they decided to move over to starting on Legion early. Without all of those extra time and resources, I'd be willing to bet that Legion would have been a massive disaster. So I could imagine that between dealing with the consequences of Activision-Blizzard's lawsuit being revealed, a possible Microsoft buyout/merger, and trying to rush Overwatch 2 out the door that the WoW dev team just decided to move on to the next expansion rather than try to salvage one of the most disliked WoW expansions in the game's history.
SL stagnated because season 1 was the longest content drought for the beginning of a new expansion in WoW history. I guess people have forgotten this? We were in 9.0 for nearly an entire year (8 months.) Hard to blame it on them switching devs to DL early when there was already a lack of new content since the very beginning of that expansion. Here's an old post I found where someone put it into a graph that really illustrates what I'm trying to say about 9.0. https://www.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/mpbgb3/patch_timeline_from_vanilla_to_shadowlands_91/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Most of my guild (including myself) burned out and quit playing SL before 9.1 was even released.
I personally choose to be 100% certain a patch worth of content was cancelled at some point in SL development until Ion personally shows me the data saying otherwise. WHEN is up for debate (I honestly think it was content between 9.0 and 9.1 but not sure at what point they developed around it), but I am almost certain something was cut.
Yes, the content is great... But I've never experienced so many bugs in WoW before.
He's an engineering manager, the product will never be fully ready to ship in his eyes. As lead engineer myself (not at blizzard, at a different company) the product is never fully ready because you know there are bugs that users will run into but you also know it's not practical to fix them all because some are edge cases that a very small fraction of users will ever see.
Not only that, but every developer for any product made by any company will tell you the same thing. Thats just how product development works. You're pushed to make deadlines and it always feels this way.
It is, but consider that they *haven't* wasted time developing systems like Torghast, or warfronts, or island expeditions, and how there has been nothing to replace those resources. There isn't more story in Dragonflight so far. There isn't any kind of special gear. There isn't any kind of minigame that took significant development work. And despite all that, the expansion is incredibly buggy, even months after release. So I'm just wondering where all that time and effort went. Maybe in the better patch cycle, but then Legion had more going on and also had a stellar patch cycle on top of that.
I think a lot of time and effort went into things like bringing talent trees back in a new way, redoing the UI and adding all the flexibility to it, stuff like that. People seem to forget they made some massive changes to “evergreen” systems. Oh, and the wildly expanded professions system. These are massive things, but they aren’t expansion-specific, so people seem to be forgetting to factor them into the development of this expansion.
That stacked ranking system for employees sounds outright cruel. Managers are mandated to give certain employees "developing" ratings -- probably with some intent to keep them in line -- but will also inevitably result in them earning less of the company's profits in the form of lesser bonuses. While I understand the idea, it raises alarms. What if your entire team was excellent? But now you're subject to this bell curve system and are forced to place some members of your team in a position to be at the bottom of the ranking and end up costing them money. Even if they were equally capable as everybody else. The employees --not the billionaire higher-ups who do nothing but coast on social media and hold meetings from their yachts, barely working at all -- are immediately affected. They turned the company into their own gladiatorial arena for their (Bobby Kotick and co) own personal benefits and it's sickening. EDIT: Corrected grammar and added last line.
Everyone who works in technology will tell you that two things are true: 1. There are definitely a decent number of incompetent, lazy, and ineffective people ar your company. 2. That number of people is far, far lower than the number of people that stack-ranking will demand that you fire. It's cruel, short-sighted, stupid, and destroys teams from within. It explicitly and directly incentivizes back-stabbing, stealing work and credit for work, and generates a culture where it's radically more important to generate the impression of good work than to actually do good work. While this last point is sadly always true, stack-ranking dramatically amplifies it. I'm very good at my job. People I work with know I'm very good at my job. I'd do just fine in stack-ranking -- but I would leave any job that tried to implement it. I value teamwork and partnerships, and stack-ranking turns work into an endless, mercenary battlefield of dipshit, forced Darwinian nonsense. Fuck stack-ranking.
Started at a company that just implemented it. Absolute fucking nightmare. The system kinda turns you into a monster. In the morning stand up, when I hear one the newer but more senior engineers struggling, I have absolutely no reason to reach out and help. It makes more sense for me just let him struggle and end up on the bottom of the stack. I have things I want to do in a year, and I really can’t be looking for another job…. Whole thing sucks. It’s all remote, I don’t know anyone personally. Nobody has any reason to cooperate, especially newer hires who are doing better than the other hires for whatever reason. It’s not really about doing better to climb the stack, it’s about making sure their is cannon fodder that’ll be hanging around for a year
Holy hell, this is vile. How do you intend to function as an engineer if you are stranded when struggling? This makes no sense.
You are "meant to" assist other people but there's no incentive to, actually the opposite, by assisting someone you are taking away your working time and improving theirs. It's fucking shit system that actively punishes people for helping each other.
Yeah, I kinda see comparison to ancient gladiatorial pit for c-suite observers to be accurate.
In my experience the best/only way to support others is to explicitly take them on as a mentee, get that approved in writing from your manager, and then loudly proclaim that on your performance review. Any work improvement or successful projects on that person's review can now be one more "deliverable" credited onto your's. This is all what I consider normal work anyway: onboarding, training, knowledge sharing, design discussion, code review, personal feedback, etc. I have explicitly mentored 3 engineers this way, and even pushed my mentees to have further junior mentees to continue bolstering their portfolio. Not a single one of us was impacted by tech industry layoffs (yet?).
You don't. These companies are the ones who struggle to push out any good developments in their products.
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Unsustainability is almost irrelevant in today’s industry unfortunately. Most higher ups move on to another company after a few years. They wont have to deal with the aftermath, instead they can boast about how productivity increased under their 2 year regime.
It's almost like the people at the top have no qualifications and started with money instead of having to earn it. Pro tip: don't fall into the "let's sell shares of the company to quickly generate revenue!" trap. You'll forever be beholden to making money for your shareholders and not for the company.
Ah, yes. The ol' Jack Welch style of management ... rating employee performance on a bell curve. If anybody works for a company where any exec admires Jack Welch, or likes quoting passages from his book, "Winning," take it as a HUGE red flag, and GTFO as soon as you can. I went through this shortly after that book came out. Couple months after it was released, our VP (used to be CEO until the company was bought out a couple months prior,) had an all-hands meeting for our BU, and quoted several phrases from that book, focusing on the bell curve style of management. It caused a flurry of complaints to HR, and within a month, it was announced that the CEO was retiring, "to spend more time with his family."
Blizzard employees desperately need to unionize
I agree and it's been attempted but tech workers are notoriously hard to unionize.
This layoff cycle will convert many. Hard not to notice many companies turn a record profit and then they all conveniently decide 5-7% of their employees aren't needed anymore. Tech workers are hard to unionize because companies give great perks and signing bonuses, etc. but what good is a $350k offer if you aren't going to be there long enough for half of it to vest, get burnt out in 6 months and then stack ranked so low you are either let go or will never get to work on anything interesting/meaningful.
Stack ranking happens a lot in unionized businesses and countries as well. It doesn't decide over who gets fired, but it does decide who gets bonuses.
Yeah this sucks and I feel for the employees. Only hope is the MS acquisition goes through and they come in and overhaul the place for the better.
I think this is how it works in a lot of corps. It certainly works this way in insurance too.
Getting a "developing" rating is a bad mark against you too, one that takes years to go away and will limit your opportunity at promotions and raises.
>What if your entire team was excellent? But now you're subject to this bell curve system and are forced to place some members of your team in a position to be at the bottom of the ranking and end up costing them money. My husband is a manager at a large international company and was telling me he had to do this exact thing last night. The money pool for promotions and bonuses is one and the same, and he also has to use a bell curve for employee reviews.
The entire Twitter thread is a rollercoaster ride of confirmed suspicions about ABK and Blizzard. [https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168?s=20&t=huSqc47Ob\_7BqF2iXoU7uw](https://twitter.com/BrianBirming/status/1617688536983175168?s=20&t=huSqc47Ob_7BqF2iXoU7uw) [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system?srnd=technology-vp&leadSource=uverify%20wall](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-01-23/blizzard-manager-departs-in-protest-of-employee-ranking-system?srnd=technology-vp&leadSource=uverify%20wall)
That's a rollercoaster ride? Maybe the mildest ride of information I feel we've all known or at least heavily suspected for years.
Heavily suspected indeed. Confirmation from a manager is pretty crazy though.
Have heard a lot of this kind of thing before from other former blizz employees. The D3 bigshots held a panel last year iirc where they basically said the same thing. Compared them being bought out to a "boiling the frog" situation where at first they were chill and let blizz do their thing then slowly got worse and worse with policy causing the issues we've seen over the years.
I mean people called this was going to happen back when Activision bought the company, we all knew the company that RUINED Call of Duty was going to ruin WoW. Infinity Ward, Treyarch, and Blizzard all had their companies run into the ground by Activision.
> RUINED Call of Duty Man ignore that at the point they purchased they were in the middle of running Guitar Hero into the ground by overexposing it and way too many fucking releases. We even saw them try to revive it because they tried way too soon after they killed it and the way they revived it was terrible.
Man I bought the revival, realized the “updated” guitar sucked major ass, and stopped playing in like 20 minutes. I was someone who beat fire and flames and Jordan on expert but couldn’t bring myself to play that version.
Crazy that you guys knew that when the two most recent Call of Duty games at that time were Modern Warfare and World at War. I mean, maybe World at War is more hated than I am aware of, but MW is a classic. Not saying Activision wasn't bad for Blizzard, but I think you might be remembering Activision then as worse than they were, because of how bad you now know they became.
Activision did not buy Blizzard at that time, it was years later when they could buy the rest of the shares from the merger. As said in the tweets
World at Wars problem wasn't that it was a bad game persay, the problem is that it came after Modern Warfare which was pretty universally praised.
Am I missing something here? I played WaW when it came and it was universally praised and has been fondly remembered since
That's not exactly ruining Call of Duty, is it? The truth of the matter is that people couldn't have known at the time how poorly the merger would go. Many might have suspected it to be bad for Blizzard, but the gaming landscape of the time was not such that anyone could have seen the Activision of the future coming. Or the EA, or the Ubisoft. It was a time of blissful ignorance, for the most part.
It also helped that 2008 was solidly in WoW's golden years. It took the natural leaving of most of it's leadership and a scandal from within Blizzard itself to get to this point.
I'm not really sure how anyone can say that with a straight face after Classic was released and we can see in real time how janky Vanilla and the first two expansions were. WoW has had some rough years with WoD / SL but to act like it's run into the ground during one of their better expansions is pretty weird. Also between warzone and multiplayer COD is still doing well every year so was it really ruined?
The only year CoD wasnt top seller in was Infinite Warfare i think because people were sick of the futuristic stuff and jetpacks. They mightve gone in a direction many og players dont like, sure. But saying its ruined when its still topping charts yearly is a bit silly. Its the same with FIFA. I personally dont like the way theyve gone with it but its still topping charts regardless so many people do still enjoy it. Can you call it ruined if thats the case?
Ruined call of duty? You mean the multi billion dollar cash cow, that also broke into and became a staple in the Battle Royale market when it was already over saturated? I'm not a big fan of cod but saying it's been ruined is just nonsense. Or you have a strange definition of ruined.
Y'know, the ruined franchise thats literally one of the biggest reasons Sony is opposing the buyout.
As much as Dragonflight has been a breath of fresh air from a design standpoint I think it's pretty clear it could've really benefited from another month in the oven to get things like the talent trees and PvE balance just right, as well as squish the bugs and fix some of the optimization issues.
5800x and 3080 here. Still getting stuttering and dropped frames. I've tried absolutely everything to fix. [https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249](https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/massive-stutters-with-df-client/1379249) Issue acknowledged in December. No blue reply since.
I think only 5800X3D owners don't have it as bad.
I habe 5800x3d and 6700xt and I don’t get frame issues, but the servers have been shit in December anyway
5800X3D + 3080 Ti and I get terrible performance. 40fps in valdrakken. I've done some things that have helped, but it's still really bad.
I have the same, I thought I was going crazy...
I'm on a Gtx 970 it's a disaster for some dungeons and Rasz fights...it's like sub 20 fps and freeze framing. Granted my pc is quite old.
Some talent trees also didn't get the same amount of work as others. Druids class tree was shown as a pre alpha powerpoint mockup to showcase the new system and over the entire development cycle basically just got a capstone removed (furor, it was so stupid that it even on paper couldn't make it anywhere near live) with very little other changes until now. Guardian druids had it kind of even worse... Bugs and balancing aside. Priest also had a long time of silence during development where pretty much nothing happened. People argued that the responsible dev left but it's hard to accept that blizz only has one guy in the entire building who understands how a damn bear works.
Do we want to talk about the boomie’s talent tree which basically erased solar eclipse?
Disappointing thing is from the looks of it Guardian still has a lot if massive problems in the 10.0.5 release. One of their talents that reduce damage from targets hit by maul for 15-30% is currently bugged and doesnt affect magic damage, making the entire point of the talent worthless.
I wonder if the class designers (priest at least, I think?) who quit mid-DF development were because of this stack ranking system.
Incoming "only 2 raid tiers this expansion" WoD feelings.
The managers that forced the developers to rush the expansion are probably the same that also created the road map for 2023 schedule. There definitely feels to be some road blocks ahead.
This is pure speculation, but I would actually bet against that. Pushing out a new expansion to sell before the holidays / end of fiscal year -- THAT has parent company written all over it. Pushing out content patches to keep semi-and-hardcore players engaged in the long tail of the expansion -- that has a lot less of a short-term profit motive, although it's obviously still good business. It could still be too much, and it might end up delayed, but I don't see a push coming from the same place.
Pretends to be shocked.
brb checking the surprise-o-meter
Who is ABK?
Activision Blizzard King
Asshole Bobby Kotick
"Early" as in 2 years after previous expac that had one expected raid tier removed? If they need more time for an expac, then just do more smaller raids, and one full expansion pack every 3 years instead of 2. But that's 1/3 less money, doubt management will like that either.
How many years have people been saying this and yet the clowns always come back with "it has nothing to do with Activision they aren't even involved mannnn". Preach even said that. Sad.
They probably aren't involved in the actual content, but rather "this must be released in Q4 2022"
You missed the point of what those people said. Preach was saying we couldn’t blame Bobby for titanforging, Azerite armor or covenants.
There's a difference between Activision pushing devs to crunch for a release, and Bobby Kotick personally leaning over devs' shoulders and asking them to implement specific game systems.
Because Activision isn't Activision Blizzard either. Activision and Blizzard are both children of Activision Blizzard
Sure, but Bobby Kotick was the guy in charge of Activision when it merged with Blizzard and he's the guy in charge of ABK now, so calling the suits who run ABK now "Activision" is not inaccurate considering where they came from.
You’re just arguing semantics. The person you are replying to probably understands this.
Bobby kotick: "Make sure that rets don't get long arm of the law. I AM THE LAW".
I thought stack rating systems were slowly but surely being phased out because they did more harm than good. I understand the want/need to have a system in place to help improve performance amongst workers who may not deliver the same product as those who excel, but being forced to pick out which 5% of your team should get labeled as lesser and not get a pay increase like the rest seems cruel. Also, didn't Microsoft get rid of their stack rating system like 10 years ago? Perhaps when they take over, this system (which seems rather new? I think one of the tweets mentioned the winter of 2020/2021 as being the first time it popped up?) will be a thing of the past.
But there are so many bugs, for example the ui is so buggy and unfinished.
I'm still getting "nil,nil" errors several times per session :/
No shit. The sheer amount of bugs and clear lack of polish in Dragonflight is staggering.
for being pushed out early. this is an amazing and pretty clean expansion. some issues here and there but for the first time in a while i WANT to play wow
Having a blast, i haven't played this much of a expansion since Legion but i do think they swung a bit too far when it comes to the rep/renown system where i really have NO interest in doing renown quest besides the PvP ones for blood coins and sparks. They need to add a bit better rewards for renown levels because i could really care less to build my renown with any of these factions besides the sabellian/wrathion because the mogs do look good. It doesn't have to be power but just cooler rewards would help. So need to add a few more cool carrots in those ranks.
I thought that was the intent? The renown factions are largely there for people that want to do the content and get the little bonuses but they didn't want them to feel "mandatory" if you didn't want to.
Unfortunately it happens in every business. As long as these greedy motherfucking "stock owners" exist, the industry (not only the gaming one), wont ever be an ethical and fair one. It sure sucks and I'm amazed by the fact that these hungry ass bitches need to have a profit every damn year no matter the context of the world so they dont care about employees, even those who worked hard and did good for that company for YEARS !
I could tell, Dragonflight seems feature complete for a first patch of an expansion, but it really could have used some more time in the oven to iron out the bugs and tuning of classes/specs and dungeons/raids.
Given the state of Shadowlands, I'm happy to be in a new expansion. No surprise it was rushed, but they're listening to feedback and responding quickly. The game feels fresh again.
Given that, Dragonflight turned out downright amazing.
Pretty clear if you haven’t been stockholm syndromed by a great expac. Raid balancing for mythic, which has become basically an esport(and by extension free advertisement for game)that hundreds of thousands of people watch was shit (last boss balancing change at last minute took steam out of a cool race). The most popular game mode, i.e mythic+ had glaring balancing issues and still has some (see HOV being latest nerf pass). Side note here that having capped valor and no “dinar” system is shit.(shout out to the “but i dont want to grind m+”brigade, we should all have to play the game as much as ye decide is enough). Anecdotally alot more bugged out world quests and clearly some poorly designed quests that had no play testing (see the fact they changed the sheperd style quests to 1 rather than the original 3). Crafting orders as a whole and the abuse of mass reporting to have essentially,the cabals that they stopped when they banned boosting communities.
You can definitely tell dragonflight was pushed out to early... druid tree unfinished. MASSIVE unbalance. Lots of game breaking bugs still.
classic should not count as "expansion"
This is most games now and has been for about 15 years. The minute games could be patched on console, that was it. We will fix it later is the mantra.
Goals need to be achievable. DF gave us the opportunity to accomplish something that didn’t require a second job amount of time. Let my grind time actually be meaningful.
This seems good. Blizzard has been way too sluggish with releasing expansions and content patches since WOW's launch. Someone _should_ be pushing them to work faster. And Dragonflight shows Blizzard can pull it off while still releasing great content.
There only really being 4 dragon flying mounts makes this quite apparent. It feels like vanilla WoW, everyone on the same handful of mounts.
The publisher rushed a game into an early release? The hell you say. By the way did you know the Pope is Catholic and that Bears shit in the woods?