Monday, November 7, 2016

It's been a long time since then.  The quick'n'dirty status is that I enjoyed the first 30 days of Warlords of Dreanor expansion for WoW, and not much after that.  I enjoyed the first month of Legion, and I saw the same 'raid required' endgame and lost interest in that too.

Blizzard, there are two things you need to learn:

1.  Some people just don't like raiding, no matter what.
If you don't remove the raid requirement from your MMO you will lose a lot of people.  I understand that it's a core piece of your progression design, but I don't care.  It simply doesn't matter how good your art or story or interface or depth or anything is, if you require me to interact with a dozen other players on our mixed schedule to play a game, then I won't be playing.  If I can't log out when I need to or do things solo because I want to and still receive the same depth of progression, I'll go play something else.  This isn't negotiable.  If you won't budge on this point then your game will die.  It's already dead to me.

2.  You have no place in your games for player creativity.
It's all about breaking things and collecting things, but anything that is even loosely in the category of creative content or expression is forbidden in your games.  There's nothing to contribute to the world, I'm just passing through it like an angry ghost.  I slay things.  I loot things.  But everything that is part of the creative spirit of the human psyche is either discouraged or outright blocked.  It gives me the message that I'm just there to pay you and entertain you, and my input it not wanted.  That's not how you build a community.

Do you remember the old days?  Back during vanilla when people would be inspired and create art and get tattoos?  Kind of diminished, aren't they?  Because you chased the creative people away.  I used to love your games, especially WarCraft III, with the creative tools included.  That's how your community was built - then you orphaned it.
Your methods are outdated and your products are stillborn.  Better PvP can be had for free, and all of your changes treat RP as something you suffer indignantly, so you need to think about how you're strangling your IP to death.