Cracks starting to show?

[Rokal]

Shattrath and Dalaran have portals again, if you care about being able to reach the other cities of your faction.

[Nevermore]

Only portals to Stormwind/Orgrimmar.  But you can base there and just portal to the latter when you need to.

[Rokal]

Well, so much for that then :p

[K9]

Removing them in the first place was a retarded move.

[Pantastic]

Blizzard has always had a tendency to latch on to an idea and not let go of it for years even when it's obviously bad, but only do this for one or two things. My suspicion is that there is someone fairly high up who gets fixated on an idea and won't let anyone else move on, but usually just gets stuck on one or two things. The biggest example of this was the old meeting stones. Back in vanilla, they added the first iteration of the 'looking for dungeon' feature, which required you to walk to the dungeon entrance (mounts were 40, so that was a literal walk in most leveling dungeons), click on the stone to join a queue, then the system would try to assemble a group, and if it did your group then walked to the dungeon to run it. As anyone with a clue could guess, this never caught on, even when they moved the 'join the queue' function to innkeepers instead of an inconvenient stone and added the 'summoning stone' functionality - people just used the summoning stones, they didn't bother with the queue. After several years of this, they quietly removed the queueing feature, then tried a global chat channel and tool like the meeting stones, and again no one used the tool since it didn't do much, and this all got scrapped. Then in WOLK they finally added cross-realm dungeon finder, which was a huge success and actually worked, but they spent a LONG time trying to get people to use the old meeting stones.

Now, the meeting stones weren't really a big deal - minor mods to the old system weren't going to get people to use it anyway, and cross-server stuff was a long way off, so it didn't matter that they kept pushing. The problem I see for Blizzard is that the higher-up with a fixation seems to have gotten hooked on this whole 'game under your real name and post it to facebook' idea, which is why they're sticking with RealID instead of battle.net IDs, and keep trying to force people to game under their real name. This already give Blizzard one black eye and it would make sense for them to ditch it entirely and just use an alias on battle.net, but since they don't I suspect they'll keep tying core features to it.

IMO the RealID addicition has much more potential to 'crack' the game than dungeon difficulty being too high or too low. People will leave if they feel like they hit a brick wall, but they'll come back later, and people stop and start playing games all the time. Breaking the disconnect between the game and real world seems to me like it's in another league entirely - it's not just the privacy, stalker, and harassment concerns, but in my experience the appeal of this type of game for a lot of people is temporarily being in another world not tied to their real self at all. Removing the ability to really get away from it all and smash some monsters or melt some faces as 'Regnar the Barbarian' instead of 'Joe the accountant', even unintentionally, really kills a big piece of the experience that's so addicting.

[Soulflame]

It's probably a combination of belief that real name usage will result in behavior modification for the better (unlikely at best.  the likeliest result is most people with something useful to say will avoid posting at all if they are forced to use their real name, and the jackasses who are jackasses for the sake of being jackasses will not be deterred by posting under their real name. Not to mention the damage that can be done with people posting under realID for a stolen account.  That sounds like a lawsuit Blizzard will not win.), with added benefit of monetizing something (ads? premium features?  I dunno.) towards people based on their circle of friends.

[Paelos]

I think you are right in some respects, although I think RealID is just a part of the puzzle. I think dungeon difficulty is only a contributing factor in exposing how much players really rely on social ties within the game in order to stay subscribed. In this expansion, Blizzard has messed heavily with their social ties in a negative way.

1 - The Guild Rep System - Gaining rep with your guild that's been around for 5 years is fucking clownshoes. Forcing you to group with people in the guild to progress ruins any other ties you had to the game outside your guild, in addition to pugs, or even bothering making new ties. It's not going to have the intended effect of "making guilds matter" by making gains require more oppressive logistics.

2 - RealID - As you're saying, people want to play these games to become something else. I don't want to be the CPA who plays wow. I want to be the dancing monkey who does taxes on the side. Attaching real names to stuff destroys social networks because at it's heart these kinds of games are our little secrets or ways of escape from normal life goals/pressures.

3 - Difficulty - The game is about progressing and about friends. If your friends suck or you suck, now you're in a position where you have to decide which one you will follow. I contend that if you don't have both, your days are numbered in this game. The harder you make the baseline content, the bigger the wedge you drive between players in the game.

[Rokal]

The biggest example of this was the old meeting stones. Back in vanilla, they added the first iteration of the 'looking for dungeon' feature, which required you to walk to the dungeon entrance (mounts were 40, so that was a literal walk in most leveling dungeons), click on the stone to join a queue, then the system would try to assemble a group, and if it did your group then walked to the dungeon to run it.

The best part of this is that, when it was originally implemented, the meeting stones would match 5 players together but didn't originally check to see whether one of them was a healer/tank. I remember the one (and only) time I tried the meeting stones to make a group. It was right after the patch implementing them came out, which also introduced Dire Maul. I ran to Feralas, clicked the meeting stone and... waited about 20 minutes. Once the group was finally assembled, we quickly noticed that it was a warrior, two hunters, a warlock, and a rogue. Yep.

Another good example of a feature they couldn't let go of for the longest time, even though it was awful, is weapon skills. Anyone remember getting a shiny new weapon only to celebrate by killing grey enemies for 3 hours to cap the weapon skill? I remember my warrior had an int set just to make the skill-up process a little faster. I still can't believe how long it took them to get rid of it.

[Pantastic]

It's probably a combination of belief that real name usage will result in behavior modification for the better (unlikely at best.  the likeliest result is most people with something useful to say will avoid posting at all if they are forced to use their real name,

The RealID on the forums was the big black eye for Blizzard, but I think they've given that up for now. What I'm talking about with them pushing RealID is tying it into core game features, like grouping - the upcoming ability to group with friends cross-server requires you to use RealID with them, and I'm sure that won't be the only feature tied to it. 

And it doesn't help that the blues are in complete denial about what RealID is used for in game and so never address issues people have. "We encourage that Real ID only be used with people you know in real life, friends, family, co-workers, school mates, etc."

Another good example of a feature they couldn't let go of for the longest time, even though it was awful, is weapon skills. Anyone remember getting a shiny new weapon only to celebrate by killing grey enemies for 3 hours to cap the weapon skill? I remember my warrior had an int set just to make the skill-up process a little faster. I still can't believe how long it took them to get rid of it.

The weird thing to me is that they got rid of weapon skill as a stat on items years (sometime in BC) before they got rid of 'skill up your weapons' bit. It was obviously a dumb system that didn't add anything to the game, was disabled in PVP, and was irrelevant to raids, but there it stayed.

[Fordel]

Stupid gameplay decisions that don't seem to go away very fast can 90% of the time be laid at the feet of The Evil Kalgan.


Stupid out of game decisions like RealID or whatever is anyones guess, probably some evil empire influence from above.

[Sjofn]

Speaking of RealID, I logged in today and noticed all the people on my friends list that were also Real ID friends were listed as their real names. Meaning that if you had me, "Sjofn Lofnsdottir" as a Real ID friend, all my characters, like Sofi and Tritana and Jassan were listed as Sjofn Lofnsdottir 1, Sjofn Lofnsdottir 2, and Sjofn Lofnsdottir 3 instead.

So I have no idea what they're planning on doing and what made the list bug out, but it makes me suspicious anyway. Plus if I have them ALSO listed as a character name on my friends list, I probably have a reason (that reason usually being I want to know when they're on MY server and on what character without having to open the friends list to look).

[Fabricated]

Weapon skills were a vestigial organ of the WoW beta where you needed to skill up EVERYTHING in order to learn spells/abilities I believe.

[Paelos]

Weapon skills were a vestigial organ of the WoW beta where you needed to skill up EVERYTHING in order to learn spells/abilities I believe.

Your "Sitting" skill has increase by 2!

[Ashamanchill]

Your logging out skill has increased by 151!

[Soulflame]

Was trade chat spamming a trainable skill?  At the very least, Barrens chat?

[Fabricated]

Weapon skills were a vestigial organ of the WoW beta where you needed to skill up EVERYTHING in order to learn spells/abilities I believe.

Your "Sitting" skill has increase by 2!

It was about that bad if I recall. You could MISS with healing spells at low skill levels.

[Hawkbit]

After a three month break, I used my 7day return pass because it was set to expire yesterday.  I logged in, played for an hour and logged back out.  I think I finally cut the cord after playing nearly non-stop since launch.  I don't have the rose-colored glasses nostalgia about WoW that I do EQ, oddly.  Maybe it will take a few years.

[Simond]

Weapon skills were a vestigial organ of Everquest and DikuMUDs

There we go. Remember the original genesis of WoW was Ariel, the pre-Tigole guildmaster of Legacy of Steel raiding in Kunark/Velious-era EQ and going "I could do this better".

[Numtini]

then tried a global chat channel and tool like the meeting stones, and again no one used the tool since it didn't do much, and this all got scrapped.

At least on Earthen Ring, this iteration of the LFG tool was in widespread use. I consider it to be the best system they ever had.

[Pantastic]

At least on Earthen Ring, this iteration of the LFG tool was in widespread use. I consider it to be the best system they ever had.

Was it the chat channel or the tool? In my experience, people just turned on that version of the tool so they'd be put into the chat channel, then used chat to actually find a group.

[Rendakor]

The chat channel was very useful on Andorhal (the actual LFG tool not so much) since it was global, and you could find groups/raids while out farming, doing dailies, etc. The current /lfd replaces that for dungeons, but there still isn't an easy way to look for a raid group without sitting in Org/SW.

[caladein]

The Raid Browser part is still there (and has Rated BGs as well), it's just that no one uses it.  Although, on my server (US-Wildhammer-Horde), no one ever used that part of it.  Dungeons got a bit of use of that but for the most part you were still stuck with chat channels.

[SurfD]

I think people did use the Raid Browser tool fairly frequently back in Wrath.  Part of the reason not many people use it in cata is because for the vast majority of the beginning of the cata launch (up to patch 4.1 i think), it was completely broken, and wouldnt let you list yourself for anything.

It is still horribly broken (or at least was the last time i checked it) for dealing with partial saves and the new shared lockout system.  If you got yourself saved to a single boss down in 10 man X, it completely prevents you from even listing yourself in the 25 man section for that raid, and it doesent seem to have any way to list your "completion" level for whatever raid you are saved to (no way other then the manual fill in to indicate you are saved to 2/4 BoT or whatever).

Honestly, they REALLY need to completely overhaul the LFRaid tool, cause as it is now, it is garbage.

They could also stand to let you list yourself in the LFR tool AND use the dungeon finder or other queue systems at the same time.  It just bugs the hell out of me that if I want to try to use their tool to find a raid, I have to completely shut myself out of possibly random dungeon / bg queuing while i wait for hits.

[Numtini]

Was it the chat channel or the tool? In my experience, people just turned on that version of the tool so they'd be put into the chat channel, then used chat to actually find a group.

For me both. I definitely got groups from the tool, particularly for dailies. I also used the chat channel and the "auto-lfg" add on that put you in it all the time.

[Azazel]

Blizzard has always had a tendency to latch on to an idea and not let go of it for years even when it's obviously bad, but only do this for one or two things. My suspicion is that there is someone fairly high up who gets fixated on an idea and won't let anyone else move on, but usually just gets stuck on one or two things. The biggest example of this was the old meeting stones.

Arena.

[Ingmar]

Arenas are fine. The people who do it, enjoy it. What's the issue?

EDIT: I mean these days. You can get conquest points in a number of not-arena ways.

[Nevermore]

The amount of nerfs that trickle down to PvE because of them.  Which is largely where my last comment about GC fucking up class balance is directed.

[Ingmar]

The amount of nerfs that trickle down to PvE because of them.  Which is largely where my last comment about GC fucking up class balance is directed.

That's just every game ever with PVP and PVE both.

[Azazel]

Adding someone's pet project so they could have an "e-sport" then rebalancing the entire game around it. No problem there, clearly.

[Azuredream]

Regarding PvP/PvE balance, I actually think they got pretty good at surgically nerfing things over the years.

[Pantastic]

Adding someone's pet project so they could have an "e-sport" then rebalancing the entire game around it. No problem there, clearly.

I remember reading an early interview where the Blizzard devs explained how their philosophy differed from EQ's. EQ devs said 'oh, we can't make lots of quests, if we do people will run quests all the time instead of grinding', while Blizz said 'oh, if we make lots of quests, people will run quests all the time instead of grinding', and ended up with lots of happy (and paying) customers questing instead of grinding. The e-sport and rated battleground pushes seem to be the exact opposite of what made them successful in the first place.

[Paelos]

Blizzard sees a shift in gaming, and they believe that they need to adapt to that market or die. They believe that the only way to retain consumers now is to go fully into the achiever mode. Before, it was about getting gear to do more stuff. Next, it was about getting reputations to open up more stuff to get more gear to open up more stuff. Now, it's about getting gear to open up more stuff to get the achievements to prove you're the man.

[Soulflame]

Achievements are nice.  Gameplay that doesn't make me want to destroy my keyboard or put me to sleep is more important.

Maybe they should focus on that instead.

[Paelos]

Achievements are nice.  Gameplay that doesn't make me want to destroy my keyboard or put me to sleep is more important.

Maybe they should focus on that instead.

I think in terms of what I did, the gameplay never changed. They just made everyone else around me so uncomfortable and so exposed that it forces them to leave rather than be constantly embarrassed/bored/raging. At that point, you're left with a decision as a player. Do you want to reinvest your time and make new social connections in a game that forced your friends out, or do you simply walk away?

[Soulflame]

That was essentially my final straw as well.  I had two guilds implode on me in a month, and I had no desire to try to find another.