Agreed. It sucks because I've watched my guild replace about 3/4 of us who have unsubbed. They are struggling with hc g'huun still. I've watched so many people I've called friends just disappear into the unknown because they unsubbed, and just stopped logging onto discord at all because WoW was the only game they played. I honestly can't compare this to WoD, because at that point I wasn't raiding seriously and really only played with a couple of RL friends who I knew would quit fairly quickly, but I have to wonder how this compares to then, because at least then the problem was that there just wasn't enough content to do, and not that the content we got was terrible. BfA honestly feels so much worse quitting than WoD did for me (I actually think I made it further into WoD before quitting even...)
I was fully prepared to get completely immersed in the game again when BfA launched. The faction warfare aspect, Christie Golden becoming involved with the in-game storytelling, and the Kul Tirans and Zandalari, they were all major hype-factors for me, and after Legion being pretty good I had high hopes. My only gripe with Legion was that I didn't have friends to play with, but a large group of friends got together for BfA. Things were looking super swell! But after a month, it was over. Lots of people, myself included, couldn't stomach playing their class anymore. Islands and warfronts were a huge letdown. People left in droves, and we simply didn't find more recruits because nobody stays in town long enough to read trade chat, they just log in, do their thing, and log out. Our forum recruitment thread remained ignored, and after the 4th disastrous Uldir HC pug in a row, I left. I loved the idea of BfA, and I wanted it to succeed, but I just couldn't like it.
I laughed. At just the immense amount of fuckery in this patch. I was waiting, Eager even, to hear ppl say 8.1 is the patch that we have been wating for. But at this point I am starting to lose hope and just admit that BFA is 100% a shitshow until the next expansion. And it is one of those instances where you can either laugh or cry and I choose to laugh.
Agreed. I canceled my 6 mo sub that I bought pre-BfA last week, expires Jan. 6th, and I expected to play until at least then and maybe resub once the raid released, but the way it's going anymore... I can barely find it in me to even log in for the remaining couple weeks I have and as more things like this happen, I'm not even sure I'll return for a raid. It's just disheartening that a game I've played for the past 12 years has fallen so far out of touch with the playerbase. There has always been issues with the game that I don't agree with, but at least if many people didn't agree with those issues Blizzard would try and do something to fix it. Now it just seems like they don't care what the players want and they have some attitude of "we're too big to fail, these idiots will pay for whatever we put out." The people that love the game don't want to unsub, and don't scream "Unsubbed!" on the forums when we all know they're not unsubbed. Personally, I want to give them my money and I want to play the game that I fell in love with so many years ago. I've made a ton of friends through WoW. But, you can also only take getting slapped in the face by people who have clearly given up on listening to their fans so many times before you walk away from it. This is depressing as fuck.
Absolutely true for me. I would love to play WoW when I get back home. But not like this. I unsubbed after being subscribed nonstop since WotLK. Even stayed subscribed when I‘ve been in China for 5 months from where I couldnt play WoW because my Account got banned everytime I tried to log in.
Blizzard's performance in BfA is a disgrace to not just themselves and their company, but the gaming industry as a whole. They used to be a shining example of how a video game company should function when compared to EA and the like. They have become the exact same. Don't mean to meme too hard but it's like Obi Wan said to Anakin in SW:3 "You were supposed to destroy the Dark Side, not join them"
Electronic Arts used to be a shining example of how a video game company should function. Valve used to be a shinning example of how a video game company should function. CDPR is a shinning example of how a video game company should function. Times change, they always do.
mindblown but honestly, with the amount of blizz employees leaving due to the cash cuts Activision executive is forcing, i wouldnt be surprised they are extremely short staffed
I really wish I were laughing. This is just depressing. Legion was such a great expansion, and as bad as BFA was on release, it's only getting worse. What changed blizzard? ;-;
Anton Cujec legion was great for pve. PvP felt sterile and boring. Bfa made PvP better byt the game as a whole a terrible experience. I unsubbed in September. Now Im wating for classic so I can enjoy my favorite game again. I am scared that they will "sneak" in changes and ruin that too though
Totally agree. I had so much fun with legion, I mean not wrath fun but modern wow fun, it’s like they are tanking it on purpose. They showed their hand though, only interested in stealing money from their customers. 0 interest in providing a quality product.
Going from legion to bfa was like going from a Dodge Viper to a Chevy chevette....not that the viper didn’t have issues but literally worlds apart in fun and design. Didn’t like the way legendaries we’re accumulated but other that that I had fun. Classes felt powerful and the artifacts for the most part added something to each class. The only explanation I have for the change is pure stupidity or pure greed. Could be both I guess.
@@pewpew4950 that is subjective. I had lot of fun in cata but not for that expansion reasons. I finaly started playing all classes and had fun playing 5-6 of them for the first time. Also that was the point when I started achi hunting so lot of things to do. But, end game raiding? Well, I can say Firelands have been decent, rest just meh.
The gear, the gear system, the gear changes over the past 4 months, it's all so bloody confusing and just sad. I hate the azerite system, the neck piece, the loss of tier sets. It's killing my guild. This expansion is killing a lot of guilds. How did we get to this point?
"How did we get to this point?" By Blizzard ignoring feedback from Legion, ignoring feedback from BfA alpha, ignoring feedback from BfA beta, and ignoring feedback from BfA 8.0. They don't care. They just don't. I wish it was different, I hate that the company has fallen this far, but they have. Blizzard is gone. I don't know what's going on internally, but the company that made the game I love is dead. They are a soulless, empty husk that designs the game however the fuck they want, regardless of feedback. If 9.0 is as bad as 8.0 and 8.1, I sincerely believe WoW will actually be dead. This is the most dire situation the game has ever been in, without question.
Oh, don't forget the removal of Master Looter, people whining about it make me sick. Its the sign of modern society when people don't have critical thinking anymore. The Master Looter brought more good things than bad overall, it incentivized trials to perform better so they could be promoted to active members so they could get that loot. It made people debate on who deserves an item more for whom it would be more beneficial. It brought guilds together or it unmade them since you had to be fair to sustain your self. And now? F. all, You get loot no matter how good or bad you are, you don't have any further incentive than just showing up on raid and hoping the other guys kill the boss so you get your RNG loot chance.
Similar situation, we started with 26 raiders. Now my guild is in a raiding community with another guild that started with 24 raiders. The community can get a 10 man together every 2nd week :(
We had 3 full 15-20man teams in mine working on normal, heroic and mythic at the end of Legion. We have cancelled raids 2 weeks in a row because we can't even get more than 7 people for raid nights.
Your gear scenario is almost exactly what happened to me on Tuesday. Get home, get settled. log in 15 minutes before raid, my pants and boots are unwearable, no warning. To think I was excited to play the patch, even reading the patch notes on my phone at work. Haven't logged in since.
About that apology... It's undeserved. There's nothing about the game being "old" that's preventing them from making the kind of open world PvP changes that you mentioned, especially since the code is constantly being updated and iterated, they simply don't want to have stronger servers supporting the game because money. That's all that the sharding tech is for, getting by with cheaper server solutions using cloud. Back when wrath launched the servers went down for a bit and we got some time added to our accounts for it, when they came back things were quite good outside of wintergrasp and Thaddius. I bring this up because in the game right now if you go into IoC and have a fight involving even 20 people on each side the lag pops up and starts choking the game, but when this content was fresh and there were several million more players there wasn't anywhere near this much lag in the battleground. It's just another thing that I've added to my list of "things that are worse now than they used to be" which has already drained my ability to give a shit about most of the game's current content.
World of Warcraft is beyond saving under the current leadership of Blizzard. They are completely out of touch with the actual player base. Publishers like Activision only care about the current gold rush of microtransactions, loot boxes and games as a service. Simply uttering these words already makes me sick to my stomach. This disgusting bubble will hopefully burst at some point, but not before World of Warcraft is long dead, sadly.
cizal - he's also the guy who then announced classic, as well as been on streams talking about it. I wish people would stop holding a single quote from him from over half a decade ago against him, he's clearly aware that people do want classic now
@@bigfoot1291 good for him. still doesn't mean he's gonna be at all useful in changing the awful direction blizzard's been going lately, considering he's probably a big part of putting the company on that path in the first place.
PrussianZwei I’ve been gone for a while now. I loved the leveling and story, but lost enjoyment after hitting cap and completing the War Campaign(War campaign wasn’t to blame everything else classes etc was). I’m going to re sub but only for WoW Classic when it’s released,
I don't need Blizzard to tell if the game is doing well, all I had to do was look at my friends list that had 30+ B-Net friends at the start but 6 weeks in I had 3 that were still logging in. Guild lost everyone but like 6 people and these people didn't go to any forum and say "I'm Quitting by damn"...they just never logged back on. I have played this game since 2005 and I hate to see what is going on but it's not a "Player" issue but rather a Dev team issue.
If private servers can handle 100s of PvPers in the same area at the same time on the 1.12 client, then I'm sure Blizzard could on retail if they actually wanted to. The reason they can't handle it now is because they are so heavily reliant on sharding for stability, which is entirely their own doing. You wasted an apology.
what you're saying at 6:00 is exactly right and it isn't just started. The players who played an RPG years ago when the game was pulling 12mil subs are gone, and the players left are those who liked the arena pvp content that no one is invested in or the dungeon crawler content you get at max level. Bliz has been catering to the same players over and over and each time pushing away the players who enjoyed the RPGMMO part of this game. For plenty of us the line was years ago and what we're arriving at now is the ultimate conclusion of a design philosophy that has been in place IMO since TBC.
I think you're completely right. When somebody says, "WoW is dead." They mean it is dead for them. What made the game great for them is gone. People have called this game dead for years. A lot of old guard players felt like this line had been crossed a long time ago (somewhere between wotlk and cata) and now the current majority of WoW players are experiencing the same cataclysm we had. What made the game great for them is going away, and it's dead to them. I couldn't imagine it getting worse than WoD... and it somehow did.
@Duck MTX would ruin WoW whether or not it affected gameplay or just cosmetics. People would flip their shit no matter what. They already do over store mounts. If MTX did have a place in WoW, it certainly wouldn't be required to play the game at a top level. I don't think we've gone that far down the deep end yet.
@Duck if you cant even afford 15 bucks a month time to get a new job. Hell pay 6 months at a time then you save a few bucks. 6 months you pay 13.00 a month
Wintergrasp had all manner of extra things such as you wish to see in world pvp, and the game didn’t grind to a halt. That was how long ago? I don’t see where a factual basis for the big apology comes from. They did more in the past on far less capable hardware supporting a far, far greater number of players.
Unfortunately thats not true. If too many were in winter grasp you got ported out or couldnt enter at all. But you cant port ppl away from zones in same manner. Sure you got sharding but even thar has limitations if everyone is doing the invasions. You saw this in wqs at start of bfa too. Zones like north of alliance capital was a lagfest because it was so many horde and alliances there.
It depended on what realm you were on, honestly. I can remember supremely laggy wintergrasps, and buttery smooth wintergrasps. But the thing is that they had control over the number of players in that zone during the battle. That kind of control doesn't really exist for open world content, outside of sharding, which defeats the point of having large scale outdoor mp content (remember lagaran). It's sort of a double edged sword. They took steps to make the world more stable by implementing sharding, but that made MMO type world interaction impossible at any scale that feels awesome.
Wintergrasp was unplayable for many, and had a maximum in zone player cap enforced during the pvp combat times. World pvp theoretically would not have a player cap. In practice, we have seen what happens when a large percentage of a server or pvp shard shows up in one place. From the opening of AQ to the release day of every expansion since, it quite literally breaks the game.
@@Preachgaming I think a big difference is that back in 2008, what made WG unplayable for many was their own systems and network (afaik), but nowadays, the problem is mostly Blizzard's servers being unable to handle much because of their sharding system making every shard have very low capacities. I could be wrong, but that's what it seems like to me.
At this point there's no point in trusting Blizz to communicate. I don't even bother to look at the PTR anymore because it feels like half the changes are made right before the patch is released.
@@cEighteen they have been quoted at blizcon that they are moving some of their best devs from their main games to work on "other projects ". Now with them killing HoTs. Just proves that this is true. Not saying this is a bad thing. Also not disagreeing with you that they are outsourcing with diablo immortal as prof. I'm just saying that Mike might have something going on with how BFA is going. That we might not have the "best" devs working on WoW anymore. And with how they like to keep stuff from us. It wouldn't be something so far fetched to believe.
I always love to point out that they haven't even tried to HIDE this fact. Ion said that players aren't smart enough to understand azerite armor (their excuse for not making it trade-able). The amount of obvious contempt that Blizzard shows for it's user base is staggering.
Peter Ellis Eh, I’m not too sure about about. They are controlled by Activi$ion. Who also controls Bungie. Another group of people who tried sneaking changes in Destiny, such as throttling xp, without telling the players.
@@FlesHBoX Let's be real there mate. Like 80% of the playerbase are complete windowlickers when it comes to understanding absolute basic things. I will not be surprised if Blizzard bakes a spell interrupt into some rotational ability because clicking interrupt on separate bind is way too difficult for these people.
@@Validifyed this is the first time i had actual world pvp no 1 sided affairs with the assault on drustvar it actually seemed fair everyone in wm doing wq there was no ''well if i go here im dead moments''. atleast for me im staying wm no matter what. somehow only one on my guild maybe other will join me
Av is an instance. This have to take intoaccount every person in this example the whole of drustvar. Not only that they potentially (depending on how they changed it) have to take into account everyone from all 3 zones as 1 instance
@@DrSardonicus Not only is that vastly overexaggerated, you're talking about client lag with frames, not the actual subject, which is server-based lag.
Honestly this is not a surprise at all. These things happen to all companies when they enter the public market though it's effects can be drawn out. This is what happens when people have 100% responsibility for what happens and 0% authority over the decisions that need to be made.
Put time into it last night and today. They started to have me for a sec. Really. Then, as i was shelling out 333k for a 3x reskin mount, i saw a youtube video pop up advertising that badass fox mount that i will never ever buy. You could have taken advantage of my weakness and pulled me back in, blizz. Its not even hard ive been addicted to this shit for over 10 years. In wod there was a meme i didnt believe about blizz intentionally killing wow. I laughed then. Now it sounds entirely reasonable.
No. Calling them Activision Blizzard removes fault from Blizzard themselves. They've said they are autonomous from Activision for years now, so let's see them prove it. Prove that they are still capable of making a good product.
@@Stanwize Considering the merger happened shortly before cataclysm release means that the first expansion that would have had any influence would have been MoP, and most likely only partial influence there, since MoP would have been well into the early development phase at that time. But beyond that, the relationship between Activision and Blizzard has been a sibling relationship for most of that time, until 4 years ago the two companies bought themselves back from Vivendi (who owned them both, and had owned Blizzard for almost the entirety of WoW's existence). It was at that point that they formed "Activision Blizzard" as a holding company for both Activision and Blizzard. At this point they were more like a married couple, but still maintain separate organizations. For all intents and purposes, they are equal to each other, and neither one "owns" the other, or has any level of influence over the other. But let's say for the sake of argument that activision was somehow exerting control over blizzard (an essentially separate company with essentially separate leadership), that still means that Blizzard is screwing up by letting it happen. In reality, if Activision was some big mean overlord, ruining precious, do no wrong Blizzard, we would have seen Activision games on bnet many years ago, instead of only just now getting the second one. Whenever people blame Activision for Blizzard's terrible decisions, you only allow Blizzard to get away with it. Most of the problems in the game now started long before the merger almost a decade ago, and are wholy the result of Blizzard making poor decisions based on an utter lack of foresight and a gradual shifting of priority from creating excellent games, to pushing the boundaries of what will keep people playing for the least amount of money.
@@FlesHBoX Dude. If you don't think Activision-Blizzard is having macro-decisions on how How Blizzard games operate, especially on content and monetary elements , then I just don't know what to say. Also just to lol: "In reality, if Activision was some big mean overlord, ruining precious, do no wrong Blizzard, we would have seen Activision games on bnet many years ago, instead of only just now getting the second one." You must be high as fuck or you have no idea how to get your point across...
Honestly I feel like this would be great I wouldn't mind waiting a long time for wow 2 in wake of classic coming soon plus if rather a new game with a different engine instead of another crap expansion
I doubt it'll happen though I agree. Blizzard is a corporation that cares more about the money than the visionary ideas that lead to a 60 levels rpg gaming experience in a huge world with hundred of zones. It's why the game now is all about the non-RPG end game content. It's easier and cheaper to make an expansion like BFA than a full game like WoW.
@@TheMadJoker87 Or hope half the Blizz developers quit and then burn it down and Start over hire back former employees who quit and make with a new official Private Server for Vanilla. But I guess it probably wont happen so long as they get their not great payment then they had back then.
Preach, Thank god you addressed the profession issue. The scenario you described was literally what happened to me. I dropped 50K to get my professions up in the 45 mins I had before raid once I got home from the IRL grind. I love these videos keep it up!
I’ve taken breaks from WoW several times since 2005. This is the first time I don’t plan on coming back. Classic WoW is the only thing I have faith in anymore, and it’s so sad to see what has happened to the game I’ve played for the majority of my life. I want to like the game, but I have given Blizzard too many last chances.
Your absolutely right Preach, I know I and my other friends who have all unsubed watch you, Belluler and others in hopes that maby, just maby Blizz figures out its problems and we can come back and love the game we've been playing together for years, since BC in my case. But its feels like every week there's something new happening that makes my heart sink a little more. I'm sure there are those that are laughing but honestly it just makes me sad. Like watching a good friend die who you can do nothing for.
I'm honestly laughing a bit. When I was subbed, I thought it was sad. Now I actually WANT them to fail because these are things we've been saying for so long now, without a single confirmation from them. They deserve it, so yes, I'm laughing a bit.
@@WolfRites yeah same. There is only so much you can beg the devs to do until you just give up and Laugh. IT is either laugh or Cry and I decide to Laugh
Simuitas-Sargeras Elemental Shaman I played a lot today. I like the new changes overall. I'm not a fan of being the victim of a lie of omission, but it finally feels like BFA actually launched. I'm very happy with the changes to elemental, I like the new war front, I like seeing currency vendors back in effect. I wish the new raid was coming out sooner. It just sucks that Blizz is full on reactive instead of proactive with their game. So if people need to unsub to send a message I understand, but for me personally, I'm still enjoying playing the game enough that the positives outweigh the negatives.
So sad... I unsubbed a few weeks into bfa and came back on a gold token a month ago to check things out and unlocked dark irons dwarves. The game is so mindlessly grindy it blows my mind. It feels like legion was just gutted and they gave some us new zones to call an expansion... I let my sub lapse again on Tuesday.
IDK, for me, and one of the biggest reasons I left WOW was not because of technical limitations, but because of poor choices for in-game designs, such as removing vendors and titanforging, and poor story telling (subjective perspective). I think anyone who has played WOW before BFA, and was enjoying it, has been leaving over other things that are less to do with technical limitations and more with other underlining issues. And whats has happened with Diablo: Immortal and Blizzard new desire to create games for a Chinese audience over their american audience might have something to do with it too. As I see it, there is absolutely no reason to apologies. Blizzard and Activision are digging this grave for themselfs.
I've left the game pretty much every expansion for one reason or another. BfA was the first one I left because the game felt unsalvageable. Even in WoD I would've stuck around for the content if I had people to do it with.
Thank you Mike, another great video. I really appreciate the time that you and a few other content creators put into digging through this stuff to try and make WOW a better experience for us all. Unfortunately, Blizzard doesn't seem to be listening anymore.
BfA should have been the expansion where they made some serious improvements on the game engine, or completely replaced it at this point. And no, upping the view distance or adding more foliage is NOT enough. Yes, I know it is a MASSIVE undertaking, but if they want WoW to keep going for 5-10 more years, they absolutely have to implement more modern features. Even simple cosmetic stuff is impossible to do, and we're stuck with these terrible armors and weapons that clip through the ground or your character's fucking head. Let's not even mention some of the cooler things they could do. Even after the disaster that was the garrison I'm still hoping for real player housing, where you can actually customise shit and not just choose 1 of 2 buildings. Having something like the Fallout 4 base building would be fucking amazing.
I honestly wonder if they actually WANT the game to survive at this point. Their best received expansion since Wrath was only "better than WoD" for player retention according to Blizz's financials. I feel like they are just trying to milk as much as they can out of it while burying it so deep in crap that shutting it down becomes a welcome option by the players.
@@FlesHBoX Yeah kinda feels like it. But instead crashing and burning everything why not just do a grande finale patch and announce that game ends when it comes to updates but it will stay in maintenance mode, that worked for FFXI so why not here as well? After all WoW is like it or not piece of digital history so it should be preserved with dignity.
So many comments saying they are just waiting for classic/bring on classic. Are you guys that ignorant about the fact that it's the same people, same company bringing you Classic that brought you BfA? What's to say they won't ruin the 'Classic' experience? And let's not forget the HUGE fact that the vast majority of players who want to play Classic right now are looking through rose-tinted nostalgic glasses, which will be shattered once the launch happens and the hype is deflated. Not just that, the CORE foundation of Vanilla through Wrath was COMMUNICATION between players/guilds and just interacting with the high number of people in cities and out in the world. That was because there were multi millions of people playing when the game was a success and it was the ONLY wow. Do you really think you are going to have the same experience when the subs are dropping like flies and they are introducing sharding into Classic as well? Sure there will be a spike in numbers at launch as there always is, but what about a month later? two months? three months? There just won't be any people! You'll be playing an MMO like a single player, which is the single biggest mistake current WoW is making. Think people, think.
Yea a lot of people are not thinking ahead like you said. It'll just be another major disappointment. And the fact is, a lot of vanilla's systems were player-unfriendly that people just forgot because of all the hype.
Preach this is why I love your content mate. Big enough to admit mistakes, but still addressing the issues you know exist in a reasonable way. Thanks for the videos
Who does blizzard listen to? Time and time again we have really good players/community members make these excellent videos or posts on forums or whatever that are well structured, informative pieces of feedback, yet blizzard rarely ever directly addresses the feedback or internalize any suggestions given. Its almost like if someone else thought of an idea, blizzard cant do it because it wasn't BLIZZARDS idea that was put in first.
Except for the part where blizzard has never really done anything original. Everything they do is taking something that others have created and adding that "blizzard polish" that used to mean something. But yeah, it really does feel like at this point refuses to accept that their players might have decent ideas, and purposefully try to do the opposite.
We were getting ready to raid mythic (Were progressing Mythrax at wed, downed him then) when 8.1 launched. 4 people in our raid had to spend well over 200k each to re-level professions, because some dipshits had foreseen this shit and monopolized all the cloth and leather to level.
8800 honor per honorlevel not to mention they fucked up the transition from legion prestige levels to bfa honor levels... i'm 20 or so bfa honor levels away from "unlocking" a mount that i unlocked in legion. pretty impressive to have so many problems with the game that things like that get by mostly unnoticed by the majority or seem so irrelevant that nobody really cares about it.
Anyone staying in wow at this point are either 1 - Battered wife-like players who know how bad it is but think that if they stick it out Craptivision will stop being shit all the time (Most content creators are here) 2 - Newcomers who don't know the mess they are getting into 3 - Stockholm syndrome fanboys with no self worth who actually ENJOY having Craptivision shit on them and shrug off any criticism from the "haters"
I haven't played wow for many years, but I've continued to watch on from a distance. Really sad to see what has happened to a game that so many people loved/love. Hope things can turn around. Great stuff Preach as always.
My favourite trinket had its animation nerfed in 8.1 for absolutely no reason. It looked great and now it looks like a shitty vanilla animation. I wonder what the thought process was behind that? Probably the same thought process to the rest of this patch, a bunch of pointless changes marketed as 'content'. I've unsubbed, looking forward to classic.
You gotta wonder what goes through their minds at Blizzard. They waste so much time changing things that don't need it while things that are still broken never get fixed. Complete shit show over at Blizz HQ.
I thought long and hard about leaving the game I loved and have played for the last 13 years' a couple of months ago and I'm honestly glad I did, nothing has changed since if anything it only seems to be getting worse. I applaud those that have decided to stick with it and I'm sorry you have to suffer through what seems like a nightmare.
I don't want to point finger at Activision, because I have no solid proof and it is possible what I notice comes from Blizzard higher-ups themselves... but... The mess with BfA comes, in my opinion, from absolutely pacified middle-to-upper management. There is no one left there who will be willing to take tough calls, afraid for being blamed if their choice turns out to be a bad one. Azerite Gear, which perhaps looked okay on paper at first, turned out to be a mess, but no one said "okay. It's time to pull the plug on this shit and start over." because it would change the release date by few months. Would you tell the top brass that you *think* main BfA feature is shit and you won't meet the deadline? Even if you would, no one would listen to your gut feelings. Unless you bring a spreadsheet showing profit loss, no one will take you seriously. State of complete pacification continues with no one willing to take the hit for communicating unpopular changes. If there is no one to blame, no one is punished. Everything is fine.
I've worked closely with a number of large companies and with their internal management on HR and internal ethics committees. Any company's executives that repeatedly respond to raised concerns by saying "it's about communication/this will be fixed with communication" are never about communication and are off in their own little world. Your option at this point is sadly either: Get used to it or leave. Only once their company fails will they learn their lesson. There is no other way.
I'm really disappointed that I got the 6 month sub mount pre 8.1. I would have never subbed for 6 months and I'd be unsubbed till at least next raid tier if I had known the current shit storm that was about to happen.
Mike, thank you for being our voice. I was so excited yesterday when I finally got to login and see all these things. My pants not working, changes to AK... I work as an elementary school teacher, I do not have loads and loads of time to grind this stuff. WoW is getting further and further away because I feel like it is no longer meant for someone like me to enjoy. It is meant for someone who has 9 hours a day to devote to the game.
The signs have been clear for awhile now. Do you guys keep up with the news for any of Blizzard's other games? Outside of Diablo 4 getting shafted for "Diablo Immortal", let's do a quick review: Continued drama for Overwatch. Pro Team and Roster changes, season changes, salary changes, sponsorship rules changing, etc, etc, etc. Viewership on both Twitch and for esports event has been down for well over 6 months now. Heroes of The Storm getting developers moved to "new projects". Their esports scene was officially cancelled for next year. World of Warcraft has obvious issues that don't need to be talked about again, overall global subs are speculated to be at all time low. Hearthstone: The only money-maker they seem to have left, but still riddled with issues and bugs, not to mention a poorly implemented esports scene and absolutely disgusting pay for Pro players. Let's just face the music eh? In fact, while we're doing the thing with the music....why not just dance to a different tune altogether? Here are 3 alternative, highly popular MMORPGS: 1. Final Fantasy 14 - Huge playerbase. Fully customizable player housing. Play every class on one character if you wish. Tab-targeting combat and similar action bar and UI as WoW. Dungeons, raids, quests, intricate crafting, etc. Box Price + Sub fee, just like WoW. Flying is available. Graphics slightly more realistic looking than WoW, but still quite stylized. 2. Guild Wars 2 - Huge playerbase. Semi-Action Combat System. Very in-depth character builds and development. Huge worlds and many expansions to explore. Dungeons, raids, questing, and giant world vs. world pvp. Base game is free, expansions cost $30-$40. The game stays at level 80, no matter if playing free base game or xpac. No gear grind. Mounts only available via purchase of 1st xpac, gliders available via purchase of 2nd xpac. Semi-stylized graphics that look more realistic than WoW or FF. 3. Elder Scrolls Online - Large Playerbase. Fully customizable player housing. Full Action Combat. Incredibly in-depth character development and builds, with no class locking for different skills and weapons. You could actually be a plate armor-wearing mage. : ) Incredibly in-depth crafting and unique guild system. Ultimate RPG experience imo. Box price for base game + expansions, monthly sub fee is entirely optional. Game stays at level 50. Further character progression is done via MASSIVE, nearly-never-ending talent trees. Gear upgrades via dungeons and raids with each new patch/xpac. Entire zone dedicated to open world pvp as well as "random battlegrounds". Ground mounts given free @ lvl 10 (alts can use them at lvl 1), but no flying. Very nearly photo-realistic graphics.
Another MMO? No thanks. My MMO career dies with WoW, i am DONE with companies ruining games online. If wow dies - ill go back to "caveman" style and only play Offline games, you know ---- that never change.
@@Catjamfan The amount of "games are service" we see nowadays makes me think that finding a game without online requirement is becoming harder and harder every year. So not sure how long you can be a "caveman" in modern times :/
Your first point was one of the reasons I loved WoW over every other MMO. The crispness of the controls, no slight delay between the button press to action on the screen. But BFA, this all turned around, quite often there has been lag. Especially if you go into some weird shards where it just puts your latency up and wont drop til you leave that shard.
jesus...i've been debating canceling my sub for a while, but i was gonna give blizz a chance on 8.1, but this...this...level of fucking over everyone in so many ways and not even telling or warning us is pretty unforgivable. i suspect i'll be canceling it now, not sure i can really hang around for all this screwing.
Between the AK debacle, the mythic keystone non-deletion change, and now the news about pulling the plug on HOTS and its eSports... Like a one-two punch to the gut followed by a knockout punch to the face. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Just a few years ago Blizzard was easily one of the bright spots in the gaming world; now they are a total joke. I would like to blame it on Activision but at some point the devs and other employees need to take responsibility for their own actions or get in the unemployment line. This is a complete disgrace.
MrCircusanimal part of that reason is their inability to attract good talent. Blizzard is known in the industry for exceptionally low pay, in one of the more expensive areas of the US. I’ve worked in the industry for almost ten years, in that time I’ve talked to many people who have got offers from Blizzard, every one was insultingly low for the level of experience they wanted for the position. “But blizzard is cool to work for” only goes so far when you have a family to feed. Combine that with the current political landscape in America, and you hardly wonder why so many top tier developers refuse to work there. Ya get what ya pay for, if you offer terrible pay, you get terrible employees.
To add on to something you asked of concerning if people stopped with their azerite levels: I did, and exactly at 29. I was really only playing since before 8.1 for alts, but recently a friend came back and I've leveled up my disc priest. While my friend plays I will continue to do stuff they want to do(they trying out pvp for the first time), but once the well runs dry I'm done with azerite again. Really just playing alts to have a feel for their legion storyline quests(I have 8 classes done and at 110), and sort of hoping something fun is salvaged, but at this rate I don't think I'll be around for 8.2 sadly.
We went from having 27 people dedicated to raiding to 6 active people. Additionally, I’ve been raiding with another guild and this happened to me. Had leather working had my 385 pants and switched to herbalism alchemy because gold but my pants where fine spent way way way to much gold to fix the damn problem. To have them reverse it. Hey blizz give me back my 37k in gold!
I stopped raiding when they got rid of 10-man, loved to do 10-man heroics. Seems stupid to remove them when Blizzard is limited by their own tech. 25-man raids always made me lag to high hell and I hated that they became the norm. Haven't touched Uldir to this day.
I loved the 10 person raid size. It was perfect if you had a smaller build. However that is somewhat mitigated because non-mythic raids scale from 10 to 30 people.
Yeah they never got rid of 10 mans. They made all raids scale so you're still able to do 10 mans. If anything its a little better because if you schedule a 10 man and 11 people log in, you dont have to tell one person the news that "yeah you're sitting around for 4 hours to see if someone else has to go" Blizz has made tons and tons of shitty choices. This wasnt one of them.
>Heroic isnt hard enough for me >mythic is too hard because it doesnt cater to the exact game settings I want Thanks for making me actually sympathetic towards the shit blizz puts up with.
Its been what 15 years of game development, and literally every game has the same problems that existed in 2003. We get new servers, new optimizations, new graphics, new everything, and yet games still are stuck with the same small scale combat. Look at Eve Online, it is a basic game, that is older than WoW, the only way they can get such large scale combat they have, is to slow everything down to a crawl. You would think that after all these leaps and bounds increases in game design, someone would have invented server architecture and hardware to run a game with hundreds and thousands of players in a single area by now. Our computers can handle it, it is the server architecture that is the issue. You cant tell me that my 1080TI, 32g Ram, SSD and I7 cant handle WoW on that scale, it is their servers, server architecture, and optimization that is the problem. They haven't invested money into it. Private servers have better server performance than Blizzard when it comes to number of players in an area. It is their hardware and network coding.
The thing with servers is that while they hardware that is much, MUCH more powerful than what you have right now, the problem is that they suffer from massive diminishing returns when it comes to having people all in 1 spot. For example: If you have a massive 500 player battle in 1 area, the server has to calculate and validate (to prevent cheaters) every single action every single player makes, and then push the changes to every single player in the area. This makes it so having a 1v1 takes relatively no resources at all because if a player casts Fire Bolt and it deals 29 damage for example, the server would need to receive this request, confirm it's not an invalid request (IE, someone trying to force a second or thousands of firebolt cast(s) through hacking while currently on the gcd), and then it push the new values (health, relevant debuffs, etc) to the 2 players. But if you take that same player and he casts firebolt in a 500 player situation, it does the same request and validation as before, however, it then proceeds to push all the changes to 500 people, making that same firebolt cast cost *over 250x more* system resources and bandwidth to push to the players without additional optimizations, which is far harder to implement than you might think. Keep in mind that this is for only 1 cast, in a 500 player situation there is going to be a hell of a lot more firebolt casting and other spells going around. As a result: You have to get incredibly crafty as you have to implement tons of tricks while simultaneously avoid opening the server/game up to exploits. Cheating was much less prevalent in vanilla wow, so not nearly as much concern was put into preventing cheaters as there is today (remember editing out the floor in the game files to skip straight to c'thun, or being able to edit out entire mountains to get to GM island?). Furthermore: Vanilla wow was also designed with optimizations meant for far weaker servers in mind, the 8/16 debuff limit is the prime example of what was probably one of those optimizations. Another "optimization" was the massively reduced amount of boss mechanics. Private servers such as Nostalrius are working with much, MUCH more powerful server hardware and likely even additional optimizations that vanilla wow did not have. While retail has unlimited debuffs and far, FAR more complex boss mechanics, neither of which would be easy on any server. So the problem isn't that they haven't invested money into it, but rather they are suffering from ever increasing diminishing returns that they decided it would be a much better idea to just focus on smaller scale content and sharding (less players in the exact same area) with more complexity.
@@Happigail_Adams you are flat wrong, they switched to cloud based virtual servers that they spin up and wind down based on the number of players and cause the sharding, they are unable to handle the content. It was purely a cost saving measure so they didn't have to pay for hardware, upkeep, cooling, and power consumption. Servers existing that can handle everything that is required, but they won't use them, to save money.
Cloud based servers aren't magic, they still use datacenters and hardware just like any other server. The difference is that blizzard is not the one responsible for hardware upkeep, they still have to keep up optimization on software as well as abide by any other limitation any other high end server would have. Cloud servers even have distinct advantages which contradict your claims that they are "weaker", they can easily be scaled, reduces the possibility of a client getting disconnected from the server, and unlimited storage. Furthermore, the biggest disadvantage is that it is *more expensive*. But it is more powerful and often better managed.
@@Happigail_Adams you are still wrong, the private WoW server community has dealt with the same issues. They can't use sharding so they just use powerful servers. They handle the scale of players fine on the better servers This is purely trying to save money on the back end done by companies. Private servers in other games such as first person shooters are able to double the capacity of "official" servers. Are you really going to say that the piss poor performance that official servers have is because their servers are better? That is absurd on its face.
From my first post "Vanilla wow was also designed with optimizations meant for far weaker servers in mind, the 8/16 debuff limit is the prime example of what was probably one of those optimizations. Another "optimization" was the massively reduced amount of boss mechanics. Private servers such as Nostalrius are working with much, MUCH more powerful server hardware and likely even additional optimizations that vanilla wow did not have. While retail has unlimited debuffs and far, FAR more complex boss mechanics, neither of which would be easy on any server." A lot of arbitrary limitations in vanilla is specifically to optimize it for the best server hardware of the era in which it was released in, as well as limiting bandwidth usage as much as possible for dial up users, Nostalrius has far more powerful hardware than vanilla was designed for and is not concerned about dial up users as dial up is a thing of the past. Retail does not have a lot of those limitations such as the aforementioned debuff limit and is far more complex in mechanics. It is utilizing the more powerful hardware in a different way to Nostalrius. Blizzard chose complexity over scale, which is why you see bosses and some quests in later expansions to be far more mechanically heavy than anything vanilla has ever had. Simply put: They built retail around a smaller scale, more complex world, rather than large scale pvp/world bosses scenario. You can't pick both complex mechanics and large scale battles in a server, you can only pick one.
Funny Preach, I just looked and you hit the nail on the head, I'm currently neck level 29. I don't Heroic raid, and TBH I can't be assed to grind shit, so I've just been getting it while going for Exalted reputations.
It's like the stealth detection on groups of mobs in M+ to spite the fact people skipped them because they are too much of a pain or imbalanced compared to other dungeons just to spite them it seems instead of balancing the power of certain dungeons and/or trash packs.
This honestly might be the first expansion where I unsub out of the game being awful rather than burnout because I enjoyed playing it. I see absolutely no reason to defend them considering how blatantly they don't care about the game outside of how much money it's making. As much as I get it's also a "funny" meme that some of these changes are Blizzards middle finger to everyone's complaints, I wouldn't doubt if that's actually what they are doing. Some of these changes seem like they are intended for nothing else than to literally just piss people off. Sidenote: Is there any way to compare the team behind Legion to the team behind BFA? Or any other expansion really. I want to see how the team changed from MoP through BFA.
all they had to do was put all of these azerite traits directly onto the heart of azeroth necklace where you would unlock more and more slots and you could cherry pick which traits you could put into each slot that you unlocked per level of azerite power. and they could have kept tier armor on top of that. they also could have made warfronts PVP and it would have made it so much better. and the gathering quests for resources for the war front could have been WORLD pvp quests that require war mode to be on to keep people out in the world during warfront cycles. correct me if i'm wrong but all of this could have been done easily and it would have been much better.
its coming, i dont like uploading more than once a day and burying my own stuff. This vid had to take priority. For reference though Drama is instantly availible immediately after its recorded on twitch.tv/preachlfw You never have to wait for YT but i also understand YT is more conveniant for many.
I'm subbed, but I'm casual these days as work and life keeps me busy. Leveling alts and doing some dungeons and such. But if I were raiding hardcore again, I can see why the changes might be enough quit. I think we all hope they right the ship and learn to communicate.
I've been playing since vanilla and even in WoD I still felt like logging in to do something. These days outside of the odd raid I just log on, check my auctions and leave. A game I've loved for 14 years is in a sorry state when I have had more fun playing MINECRAFT for the lols.
I love you preach. You just spoke my feelings. I stopped playing like 2 months ago tired of how horrible bfa had become, I waited for the patch hoping to get the game I paid for, I logged in on patch day and in like 3 days I've found dozens of bugs, things not working right, things that got changed without any notice and an amount of content that is just too little for the time we have waited and where most of this content is fixing things that should be working like that at the start of the expansion. I feel so sad man, I love this game I just feel blizzard wants to make us hate it...
I can easily say the ONLY (and I mean only) reason I am still subbed is to raid Mythic with my guild two nights a week. I’ve never gotten to “Raid, do weekly upkeep requirments (for my guild it’s just one +10 now..) and log off”. I just want to feel excited to come home and log onto WoW again..
I am reminded of early Diablo 3. I remember the patch where Blizzard changed Wizards' Force Armor without telling anyone or putting it in the patch notes. Countless Hardcore Wizards died that day, because of a stealth change to a core defensive ability. And Blizzard's official stance on restoring those characters was "Nope. Never. Doesn't matter why it happened." That day my opinion of Blizzard took a severe hit. That was inexcusable no matter how you looked at it. It's been downhill since. Like they just do not give a flying rat's ass about their players anymore.
It’s pretty tragic on a whole and the affect on remainers trying to get the most out of a game with dwindling numbers creates bad attitudes and animosity in guilds. My 6th guild this expac never known it to be this rough .
lets face facts here. Blizzard have gone from making a game they love to being snake oil salesmen. The sickening reality is that spreedsheets to maximise profits have replaced their make their game amazing mentality.
Preach I love your content - I’ve played since vanilla (didn’t play wrath and wod tho) this is my only game I play, wow is my happy place **was** my happy place...full time worker and dad and sadly all this BS has made me Not play....feels bad man can’t wait for classic - thanks for being real
i dont think anyone who unsubbed is laughing... i think they're just disappointed we all love wow and now its become a fucking mess its sad it hurts
Agreed. It sucks because I've watched my guild replace about 3/4 of us who have unsubbed. They are struggling with hc g'huun still. I've watched so many people I've called friends just disappear into the unknown because they unsubbed, and just stopped logging onto discord at all because WoW was the only game they played.
I honestly can't compare this to WoD, because at that point I wasn't raiding seriously and really only played with a couple of RL friends who I knew would quit fairly quickly, but I have to wonder how this compares to then, because at least then the problem was that there just wasn't enough content to do, and not that the content we got was terrible. BfA honestly feels so much worse quitting than WoD did for me (I actually think I made it further into WoD before quitting even...)
I was fully prepared to get completely immersed in the game again when BfA launched. The faction warfare aspect, Christie Golden becoming involved with the in-game storytelling, and the Kul Tirans and Zandalari, they were all major hype-factors for me, and after Legion being pretty good I had high hopes. My only gripe with Legion was that I didn't have friends to play with, but a large group of friends got together for BfA. Things were looking super swell!
But after a month, it was over. Lots of people, myself included, couldn't stomach playing their class anymore. Islands and warfronts were a huge letdown. People left in droves, and we simply didn't find more recruits because nobody stays in town long enough to read trade chat, they just log in, do their thing, and log out. Our forum recruitment thread remained ignored, and after the 4th disastrous Uldir HC pug in a row, I left.
I loved the idea of BfA, and I wanted it to succeed, but I just couldn't like it.
I laughed. At just the immense amount of fuckery in this patch. I was waiting, Eager even, to hear ppl say 8.1 is the patch that we have been wating for. But at this point I am starting to lose hope and just admit that BFA is 100% a shitshow until the next expansion. And it is one of those instances where you can either laugh or cry and I choose to laugh.
Agreed. I canceled my 6 mo sub that I bought pre-BfA last week, expires Jan. 6th, and I expected to play until at least then and maybe resub once the raid released, but the way it's going anymore... I can barely find it in me to even log in for the remaining couple weeks I have and as more things like this happen, I'm not even sure I'll return for a raid. It's just disheartening that a game I've played for the past 12 years has fallen so far out of touch with the playerbase. There has always been issues with the game that I don't agree with, but at least if many people didn't agree with those issues Blizzard would try and do something to fix it. Now it just seems like they don't care what the players want and they have some attitude of "we're too big to fail, these idiots will pay for whatever we put out."
The people that love the game don't want to unsub, and don't scream "Unsubbed!" on the forums when we all know they're not unsubbed. Personally, I want to give them my money and I want to play the game that I fell in love with so many years ago. I've made a ton of friends through WoW. But, you can also only take getting slapped in the face by people who have clearly given up on listening to their fans so many times before you walk away from it. This is depressing as fuck.
Absolutely true for me. I would love to play WoW when I get back home. But not like this. I unsubbed after being subscribed nonstop since WotLK. Even stayed subscribed when I‘ve been in China for 5 months from where I couldnt play WoW because my Account got banned everytime I tried to log in.
Blizzard's performance in BfA is a disgrace to not just themselves and their company, but the gaming industry as a whole.
They used to be a shining example of how a video game company should function when compared to EA and the like.
They have become the exact same. Don't mean to meme too hard but it's like Obi Wan said to Anakin in SW:3 "You were supposed to destroy the Dark Side, not join them"
"When compared to EA" mate Blizzard doesn't exist anymore, Its Craptivision wearing the husk to fool people into funneling money to them.
I mean hey when you're at the top the only place to go is down.
Electronic Arts used to be a shining example of how a video game company should function.
Valve used to be a shinning example of how a video game company should function.
CDPR is a shinning example of how a video game company should function.
Times change, they always do.
Poor sweet summer child, BFA is a top 10 Pc release in 2018. TOP 10 in a class of THOUSANDS
@@tehevilengineer7939 So what? Just because it ends up on some arbitrary top 10 list doesn't mean it's resolved of all wrongdoings past and present.
Wait, what if they’re bad at communicating because they don’t have phones?
I dropped my phone this made me laugh so hard
Savage
This is gold :)))
mindblown
but honestly, with the amount of blizz employees leaving due to the cash cuts Activision executive is forcing, i wouldnt be surprised they are extremely short staffed
They have phones "we all have phones" they just don't have pc's.
I really wish I were laughing. This is just depressing. Legion was such a great expansion, and as bad as BFA was on release, it's only getting worse. What changed blizzard? ;-;
Anton Cujec legion was great for pve. PvP felt sterile and boring. Bfa made PvP better byt the game as a whole a terrible experience. I unsubbed in September. Now Im wating for classic so I can enjoy my favorite game again. I am scared that they will "sneak" in changes and ruin that too though
Totally agree. I had so much fun with legion, I mean not wrath fun but modern wow fun, it’s like they are tanking it on purpose. They showed their hand though, only interested in stealing money from their customers. 0 interest in providing a quality product.
@@paullatina7413 nah mate, BFA is shit 100%. Cataclysm had its ups and downs, BFA is just downs.
Going from legion to bfa was like going from a Dodge Viper to a Chevy chevette....not that the viper didn’t have issues but literally worlds apart in fun and design. Didn’t like the way legendaries we’re accumulated but other that that I had fun. Classes felt powerful and the artifacts for the most part added something to each class. The only explanation I have for the change is pure stupidity or pure greed. Could be both I guess.
@@pewpew4950 that is subjective. I had lot of fun in cata but not for that expansion reasons. I finaly started playing all classes and had fun playing 5-6 of them for the first time. Also that was the point when I started achi hunting so lot of things to do. But, end game raiding? Well, I can say Firelands have been decent, rest just meh.
The gear, the gear system, the gear changes over the past 4 months, it's all so bloody confusing and just sad. I hate the azerite system, the neck piece, the loss of tier sets. It's killing my guild. This expansion is killing a lot of guilds. How did we get to this point?
"How did we get to this point?"
By Blizzard ignoring feedback from Legion, ignoring feedback from BfA alpha, ignoring feedback from BfA beta, and ignoring feedback from BfA 8.0. They don't care. They just don't. I wish it was different, I hate that the company has fallen this far, but they have. Blizzard is gone. I don't know what's going on internally, but the company that made the game I love is dead. They are a soulless, empty husk that designs the game however the fuck they want, regardless of feedback.
If 9.0 is as bad as 8.0 and 8.1, I sincerely believe WoW will actually be dead. This is the most dire situation the game has ever been in, without question.
Generational shift within Blizzard. They're [mostly] not the same devs anymore.
Oh, don't forget the removal of Master Looter, people whining about it make me sick. Its the sign of modern society when people don't have critical thinking anymore. The Master Looter brought more good things than bad overall, it incentivized trials to perform better so they could be promoted to active members so they could get that loot. It made people debate on who deserves an item more for whom it would be more beneficial. It brought guilds together or it unmade them since you had to be fair to sustain your self.
And now? F. all, You get loot no matter how good or bad you are, you don't have any further incentive than just showing up on raid and hoping the other guys kill the boss so you get your RNG loot chance.
How? Activision bought Blizzard. That's how.
Go back and track the little changes each expansion. It started in TBC and it continues to now.
Don't need hard statistics, raid team went from having easily 22 people available to 7. This expansion is the worst
Same.. we went from 20 to 13
we had started uldir with 28 raiders, we are now ending the tier with 20 with over 3/4ths of the original team unsubbed.
We went from 35 to 23
We stilö can raid but ghuun wont die 🤷♂️
Similar situation, we started with 26 raiders. Now my guild is in a raiding community with another guild that started with 24 raiders. The community can get a 10 man together every 2nd week :(
We had 3 full 15-20man teams in mine working on normal, heroic and mythic at the end of Legion. We have cancelled raids 2 weeks in a row because we can't even get more than 7 people for raid nights.
Your gear scenario is almost exactly what happened to me on Tuesday. Get home, get settled. log in 15 minutes before raid, my pants and boots are unwearable, no warning.
To think I was excited to play the patch, even reading the patch notes on my phone at work. Haven't logged in since.
I mean, you could've dropped Herbalism or whatever and get Tailoring again, only required 1 skill.
@@mikeyrajcevski2624 required 110 for the 385
Richard Janák maybe on us on eu, i logged in at 5 am, aka the second servers got back up and was able to wear two of my 385 pieces with 1 skill
About that apology... It's undeserved. There's nothing about the game being "old" that's preventing them from making the kind of open world PvP changes that you mentioned, especially since the code is constantly being updated and iterated, they simply don't want to have stronger servers supporting the game because money. That's all that the sharding tech is for, getting by with cheaper server solutions using cloud. Back when wrath launched the servers went down for a bit and we got some time added to our accounts for it, when they came back things were quite good outside of wintergrasp and Thaddius. I bring this up because in the game right now if you go into IoC and have a fight involving even 20 people on each side the lag pops up and starts choking the game, but when this content was fresh and there were several million more players there wasn't anywhere near this much lag in the battleground. It's just another thing that I've added to my list of "things that are worse now than they used to be" which has already drained my ability to give a shit about most of the game's current content.
World of Warcraft is beyond saving under the current leadership of Blizzard. They are completely out of touch with the actual player base. Publishers like Activision only care about the current gold rush of microtransactions, loot boxes and games as a service. Simply uttering these words already makes me sick to my stomach. This disgusting bubble will hopefully burst at some point, but not before World of Warcraft is long dead, sadly.
They just switched CEO, give him a chance
I got nausea just reading that.
@@PlaneetRuk they just switched CEO to the guy who said "you think you do, but you don't" about classic wow. it's nonsense.
cizal - he's also the guy who then announced classic, as well as been on streams talking about it. I wish people would stop holding a single quote from him from over half a decade ago against him, he's clearly aware that people do want classic now
@@bigfoot1291 good for him. still doesn't mean he's gonna be at all useful in changing the awful direction blizzard's been going lately, considering he's probably a big part of putting the company on that path in the first place.
I just cancelled my WoW sub today. I'm not coming back, the blizzard we loved is gone.
Been gone for awhile. Rest of the players I assume are trying to breath oxygen into coals that are burned out.
PrussianZwei I’ve been gone for a while now. I loved the leveling and story, but lost enjoyment after hitting cap and completing the War Campaign(War campaign wasn’t to blame everything else classes etc was). I’m going to re sub but only for WoW Classic when it’s released,
@@BlastHeart96 leveling is made easier and the story is fine just once max level not much to keep players going.
PrussianZwei That was exactly my point.
I'm amazed you lasted so long
I don't need Blizzard to tell if the game is doing well, all I had to do was look at my friends list that had 30+ B-Net friends at the start but 6 weeks in I had 3 that were still logging in. Guild lost everyone but like 6 people and these people didn't go to any forum and say "I'm Quitting by damn"...they just never logged back on. I have played this game since 2005 and I hate to see what is going on but it's not a "Player" issue but rather a Dev team issue.
no joke that also has happened to me
If private servers can handle 100s of PvPers in the same area at the same time on the 1.12 client, then I'm sure Blizzard could on retail if they actually wanted to. The reason they can't handle it now is because they are so heavily reliant on sharding for stability, which is entirely their own doing. You wasted an apology.
Not only that sharding allows them the cut server costs and thats why they want to add it to classic and loot trading ofc
what you're saying at 6:00 is exactly right and it isn't just started. The players who played an RPG years ago when the game was pulling 12mil subs are gone, and the players left are those who liked the arena pvp content that no one is invested in or the dungeon crawler content you get at max level. Bliz has been catering to the same players over and over and each time pushing away the players who enjoyed the RPGMMO part of this game.
For plenty of us the line was years ago and what we're arriving at now is the ultimate conclusion of a design philosophy that has been in place IMO since TBC.
I think you're completely right. When somebody says, "WoW is dead." They mean it is dead for them. What made the game great for them is gone. People have called this game dead for years. A lot of old guard players felt like this line had been crossed a long time ago (somewhere between wotlk and cata) and now the current majority of WoW players are experiencing the same cataclysm we had.
What made the game great for them is going away, and it's dead to them. I couldn't imagine it getting worse than WoD... and it somehow did.
Blizzard definitely doesn't cater to arena players, believe me, PvP has been butchered relentlessly since MoP
Honestly, I feel the subscription fee is no longer justified considering the quality of this "product".
I completely agree, what we paid for was good servers but once you engage in "large" scale pvp combat the servers die and everyone phase out.
@Duck MTX would ruin WoW whether or not it affected gameplay or just cosmetics. People would flip their shit no matter what. They already do over store mounts. If MTX did have a place in WoW, it certainly wouldn't be required to play the game at a top level. I don't think we've gone that far down the deep end yet.
@Duck if you cant even afford 15 bucks a month time to get a new job. Hell pay 6 months at a time then you save a few bucks. 6 months you pay 13.00 a month
Wintergrasp had all manner of extra things such as you wish to see in world pvp, and the game didn’t grind to a halt. That was how long ago? I don’t see where a factual basis for the big apology comes from. They did more in the past on far less capable hardware supporting a far, far greater number of players.
Unfortunately thats not true. If too many were in winter grasp you got ported out or couldnt enter at all. But you cant port ppl away from zones in same manner. Sure you got sharding but even thar has limitations if everyone is doing the invasions. You saw this in wqs at start of bfa too. Zones like north of alliance capital was a lagfest because it was so many horde and alliances there.
It depended on what realm you were on, honestly. I can remember supremely laggy wintergrasps, and buttery smooth wintergrasps. But the thing is that they had control over the number of players in that zone during the battle. That kind of control doesn't really exist for open world content, outside of sharding, which defeats the point of having large scale outdoor mp content (remember lagaran). It's sort of a double edged sword. They took steps to make the world more stable by implementing sharding, but that made MMO type world interaction impossible at any scale that feels awesome.
sadly not true as others have stated. Wintergrasp was unplayable for many
Wintergrasp was unplayable for many, and had a maximum in zone player cap enforced during the pvp combat times. World pvp theoretically would not have a player cap. In practice, we have seen what happens when a large percentage of a server or pvp shard shows up in one place. From the opening of AQ to the release day of every expansion since, it quite literally breaks the game.
@@Preachgaming I think a big difference is that back in 2008, what made WG unplayable for many was their own systems and network (afaik), but nowadays, the problem is mostly Blizzard's servers being unable to handle much because of their sharding system making every shard have very low capacities. I could be wrong, but that's what it seems like to me.
At this point there's no point in trusting Blizz to communicate. I don't even bother to look at the PTR anymore because it feels like half the changes are made right before the patch is released.
But preach, they are interns! The best devs moved on to mobile, i mean come on don't you have phone?
I made a friendship bracelet for my friend but I couldn't give it to him cuz' it was BoP. I had to throw it in a fire for more materials.
aids is bop
Maybe we have the interns since they are putting their best devs on mobile games. They just killed HoTs for this reason.
they're not putting their best devs on mobile games, they're outsourcing the mobile games to other companies
@Cthulhu yep no support going towards that game but everyone called it in its first month of release.
@Cthulhu that is very true
@@cEighteen One of the devs said they're putting their best devs on mobile games after the Diablo Immortal fiasco. That's what he's referring to.
@@cEighteen they have been quoted at blizcon that they are moving some of their best devs from their main games to work on "other projects ". Now with them killing HoTs. Just proves that this is true. Not saying this is a bad thing. Also not disagreeing with you that they are outsourcing with diablo immortal as prof. I'm just saying that Mike might have something going on with how BFA is going. That we might not have the "best" devs working on WoW anymore. And with how they like to keep stuff from us. It wouldn't be something so far fetched to believe.
It’s not a lack of communication. They just think their player base is stupid and can sneak stuff into the game.
I always love to point out that they haven't even tried to HIDE this fact. Ion said that players aren't smart enough to understand azerite armor (their excuse for not making it trade-able). The amount of obvious contempt that Blizzard shows for it's user base is staggering.
I think it's something much worse. There just aren't enough people working on the game to meet their release schedule
Peter Ellis Eh, I’m not too sure about about. They are controlled by Activi$ion. Who also controls Bungie. Another group of people who tried sneaking changes in Destiny, such as throttling xp, without telling the players.
@@FlesHBoX Let's be real there mate. Like 80% of the playerbase are complete windowlickers when it comes to understanding absolute basic things. I will not be surprised if Blizzard bakes a spell interrupt into some rotational ability because clicking interrupt on separate bind is way too difficult for these people.
"Surrounded by 40 Alliance."
So every Alliance player with War mode on in the entire world?
@@Validifyed this is the first time i had actual world pvp no 1 sided affairs with the assault on drustvar it actually seemed fair everyone in wm doing wq there was no ''well if i go here im dead moments''. atleast for me im staying wm no matter what. somehow only one on my guild maybe other will join me
Yes people faction changed, in fact whole guilds did because blizzard can't balance the racials.
honestly speaking war mode has been fire in 8.1
so many more alliance are playing when there's an incursion
Have you ever flied to Tol Dagor with War mode on as an Alliance? There's your reason.
Unless you live in australia
idk man if they could do 40v40 in av 15 years ago, seems like they should be able to do 40v40 in zones now
Av is an instance.
This have to take intoaccount every person in this example the whole of drustvar. Not only that they potentially (depending on how they changed it) have to take into account everyone from all 3 zones as 1 instance
@@DrSardonicus Not only is that vastly overexaggerated, you're talking about client lag with frames, not the actual subject, which is server-based lag.
Honestly this is not a surprise at all. These things happen to all companies when they enter the public market though it's effects can be drawn out. This is what happens when people have 100% responsibility for what happens and 0% authority over the decisions that need to be made.
If oldschool WoW has proven anything, it's that if the game is good, then it's not a big deal if it runs like shit.
not in 2018
Dont apologize for their shortcomings, they need to apologize.
the world today, sheesh.
The new Q&A gave alot of 'non'-answers - great communication picking questions and not giving clear answers to them.
So.... a fairly standard Blizzard Q&A then?
Isnt the qa later today? Is it over?
Cas plays I think the op is talking about a QnA that Ion did for the Greek players.
@@kevinthompson7055 no knowledge of that i think
Go figure. Ion's an ex-lawyer. Spewing mountains of word salad with no substance is what he got paid to do.
Put time into it last night and today. They started to have me for a sec. Really. Then, as i was shelling out 333k for a 3x reskin mount, i saw a youtube video pop up advertising that badass fox mount that i will never ever buy. You could have taken advantage of my weakness and pulled me back in, blizz. Its not even hard ive been addicted to this shit for over 10 years.
In wod there was a meme i didnt believe about blizz intentionally killing wow. I laughed then. Now it sounds entirely reasonable.
Mike you really shouldn't give your pants to strangers.
I tried it but they were rejected.
I fell on my knees and started crying...
It was a sad day...
Preach, you need to start saying "Activision Blizzard". This is no longer just Blizzard and the community needs to acknowledge it.
You realize it's been almost a decade since the merger, right?
@@FlesHBoX yea a decade since wow lost about 9 million subs... not saying there is a connection or anything
No. Calling them Activision Blizzard removes fault from Blizzard themselves. They've said they are autonomous from Activision for years now, so let's see them prove it. Prove that they are still capable of making a good product.
@@Stanwize Considering the merger happened shortly before cataclysm release means that the first expansion that would have had any influence would have been MoP, and most likely only partial influence there, since MoP would have been well into the early development phase at that time.
But beyond that, the relationship between Activision and Blizzard has been a sibling relationship for most of that time, until 4 years ago the two companies bought themselves back from Vivendi (who owned them both, and had owned Blizzard for almost the entirety of WoW's existence). It was at that point that they formed "Activision Blizzard" as a holding company for both Activision and Blizzard. At this point they were more like a married couple, but still maintain separate organizations. For all intents and purposes, they are equal to each other, and neither one "owns" the other, or has any level of influence over the other.
But let's say for the sake of argument that activision was somehow exerting control over blizzard (an essentially separate company with essentially separate leadership), that still means that Blizzard is screwing up by letting it happen.
In reality, if Activision was some big mean overlord, ruining precious, do no wrong Blizzard, we would have seen Activision games on bnet many years ago, instead of only just now getting the second one.
Whenever people blame Activision for Blizzard's terrible decisions, you only allow Blizzard to get away with it. Most of the problems in the game now started long before the merger almost a decade ago, and are wholy the result of Blizzard making poor decisions based on an utter lack of foresight and a gradual shifting of priority from creating excellent games, to pushing the boundaries of what will keep people playing for the least amount of money.
@@FlesHBoX Dude. If you don't think Activision-Blizzard is having macro-decisions on how How Blizzard games operate, especially on content and monetary elements , then I just don't know what to say.
Also just to lol:
"In reality, if Activision was some big mean overlord, ruining precious, do no wrong Blizzard, we would have seen Activision games on bnet many years ago, instead of only just now getting the second one."
You must be high as fuck or you have no idea how to get your point across...
I think they need to make WoW 2 if there old game cant handle all stuff going on.
Honestly I feel like this would be great I wouldn't mind waiting a long time for wow 2 in wake of classic coming soon plus if rather a new game with a different engine instead of another crap expansion
I doubt it'll happen though I agree. Blizzard is a corporation that cares more about the money than the visionary ideas that lead to a 60 levels rpg gaming experience in a huge world with hundred of zones. It's why the game now is all about the non-RPG end game content. It's easier and cheaper to make an expansion like BFA than a full game like WoW.
so they can ruin it? no thanks, lets wait for the collapse of actiblizz and then we can talk about redemption
@@TheMadJoker87 Or hope half the Blizz developers quit and then burn it down and Start over hire back former employees who quit and make with a new official Private Server for Vanilla. But I guess it probably wont happen so long as they get their not great payment then they had back then.
WoW IMMORTAL it is
Preach, Thank god you addressed the profession issue. The scenario you described was literally what happened to me. I dropped 50K to get my professions up in the 45 mins I had before raid once I got home from the IRL grind. I love these videos keep it up!
Christ, Mike it's 3 am.
The grind never stops for him
I thought I was crazy for waking up at 5...
Maybe he was watching the meteor shower as well
wtb editor
..eternal?
It really comes down to what you've said since Legion's Alpha. Blizzard's pride.
I’ve taken breaks from WoW several times since 2005. This is the first time I don’t plan on coming back. Classic WoW is the only thing I have faith in anymore, and it’s so sad to see what has happened to the game I’ve played for the majority of my life. I want to like the game, but I have given Blizzard too many last chances.
Your absolutely right Preach, I know I and my other friends who have all unsubed watch you, Belluler and others in hopes that maby, just maby Blizz figures out its problems and we can come back and love the game we've been playing together for years, since BC in my case.
But its feels like every week there's something new happening that makes my heart sink a little more.
I'm sure there are those that are laughing but honestly it just makes me sad.
Like watching a good friend die who you can do nothing for.
I'm unsubbed. Listening to this video. But I'm not laughing.
I'm honestly laughing a bit. When I was subbed, I thought it was sad. Now I actually WANT them to fail because these are things we've been saying for so long now, without a single confirmation from them. They deserve it, so yes, I'm laughing a bit.
@@WolfRites yeah same. There is only so much you can beg the devs to do until you just give up and Laugh. IT is either laugh or Cry and I decide to Laugh
I unsubbed, and now fondly remember the days when Blizzard made good games, and not dogshit.
@@WolfRites i'm also unsubbed but i still love the game and rather see great changes to get me back to game than seeing them fail time after time
Im so god damn angry at blizzard or rather ativision
Simuitas-Sargeras Elemental Shaman I played a lot today. I like the new changes overall. I'm not a fan of being the victim of a lie of omission, but it finally feels like BFA actually launched. I'm very happy with the changes to elemental, I like the new war front, I like seeing currency vendors back in effect. I wish the new raid was coming out sooner. It just sucks that Blizz is full on reactive instead of proactive with their game. So if people need to unsub to send a message I understand, but for me personally, I'm still enjoying playing the game enough that the positives outweigh the negatives.
I wish I could feel this way. I want WoW back. The real WoW.
Joseph Axenroth
man stay out of drugs,not good for you
So sad... I unsubbed a few weeks into bfa and came back on a gold token a month ago to check things out and unlocked dark irons dwarves. The game is so mindlessly grindy it blows my mind. It feels like legion was just gutted and they gave some us new zones to call an expansion... I let my sub lapse again on Tuesday.
love Ur videos Mike. Spotted on as always
IDK, for me, and one of the biggest reasons I left WOW was not because of technical limitations, but because of poor choices for in-game designs, such as removing vendors and titanforging, and poor story telling (subjective perspective). I think anyone who has played WOW before BFA, and was enjoying it, has been leaving over other things that are less to do with technical limitations and more with other underlining issues. And whats has happened with Diablo: Immortal and Blizzard new desire to create games for a Chinese audience over their american audience might have something to do with it too.
As I see it, there is absolutely no reason to apologies. Blizzard and Activision are digging this grave for themselfs.
I've left the game pretty much every expansion for one reason or another. BfA was the first one I left because the game felt unsalvageable. Even in WoD I would've stuck around for the content if I had people to do it with.
it is not blizzard. all companies will look for the asian market over the western.
Thank you Mike, another great video. I really appreciate the time that you and a few other content creators put into digging through this stuff to try and make WOW a better experience for us all. Unfortunately, Blizzard doesn't seem to be listening anymore.
BfA should have been the expansion where they made some serious improvements on the game engine, or completely replaced it at this point. And no, upping the view distance or adding more foliage is NOT enough.
Yes, I know it is a MASSIVE undertaking, but if they want WoW to keep going for 5-10 more years, they absolutely have to implement more modern features. Even simple cosmetic stuff is impossible to do, and we're stuck with these terrible armors and weapons that clip through the ground or your character's fucking head. Let's not even mention some of the cooler things they could do.
Even after the disaster that was the garrison I'm still hoping for real player housing, where you can actually customise shit and not just choose 1 of 2 buildings. Having something like the Fallout 4 base building would be fucking amazing.
I honestly wonder if they actually WANT the game to survive at this point. Their best received expansion since Wrath was only "better than WoD" for player retention according to Blizz's financials. I feel like they are just trying to milk as much as they can out of it while burying it so deep in crap that shutting it down becomes a welcome option by the players.
@@FlesHBoX Yeah kinda feels like it. But instead crashing and burning everything why not just do a grande finale patch and announce that game ends when it comes to updates but it will stay in maintenance mode, that worked for FFXI so why not here as well? After all WoW is like it or not piece of digital history so it should be preserved with dignity.
They STILL haven't reverted the GD AH changes to mat listing price. I knew that change was fucking permanent.
So many comments saying they are just waiting for classic/bring on classic. Are you guys that ignorant about the fact that it's the same people, same company bringing you Classic that brought you BfA? What's to say they won't ruin the 'Classic' experience? And let's not forget the HUGE fact that the vast majority of players who want to play Classic right now are looking through rose-tinted nostalgic glasses, which will be shattered once the launch happens and the hype is deflated. Not just that, the CORE foundation of Vanilla through Wrath was COMMUNICATION between players/guilds and just interacting with the high number of people in cities and out in the world. That was because there were multi millions of people playing when the game was a success and it was the ONLY wow. Do you really think you are going to have the same experience when the subs are dropping like flies and they are introducing sharding into Classic as well? Sure there will be a spike in numbers at launch as there always is, but what about a month later? two months? three months? There just won't be any people! You'll be playing an MMO like a single player, which is the single biggest mistake current WoW is making. Think people, think.
Yea a lot of people are not thinking ahead like you said. It'll just be another major disappointment. And the fact is, a lot of vanilla's systems were player-unfriendly that people just forgot because of all the hype.
Thanks so much Preach for making these videos. We can only hope these discussions improve the game that we love so that we can come back to play it.
ion hazzikostas has disliked this video
Preach this is why I love your content mate. Big enough to admit mistakes, but still addressing the issues you know exist in a reasonable way. Thanks for the videos
Who does blizzard listen to? Time and time again we have really good players/community members make these excellent videos or posts on forums or whatever that are well structured, informative pieces of feedback, yet blizzard rarely ever directly addresses the feedback or internalize any suggestions given. Its almost like if someone else thought of an idea, blizzard cant do it because it wasn't BLIZZARDS idea that was put in first.
Except for the part where blizzard has never really done anything original. Everything they do is taking something that others have created and adding that "blizzard polish" that used to mean something. But yeah, it really does feel like at this point refuses to accept that their players might have decent ideas, and purposefully try to do the opposite.
@@FlesHBoX Im not talking about the 'big picture wow-coppied-everquest' im talking smaller details, especially after a game of theirs has launched.
We were getting ready to raid mythic (Were progressing Mythrax at wed, downed him then) when 8.1 launched. 4 people in our raid had to spend well over 200k each to re-level professions, because some dipshits had foreseen this shit and monopolized all the cloth and leather to level.
Has there actually been a single content drop this expansion that hasn't been a complete trainwreck?
The pet stuff has been pretty good, not sure a sub is worth that alone though even for those who really enjoy it..
Heritage armour?
That's pretty much it.
8800 honor per honorlevel not to mention they fucked up the transition from legion prestige levels to bfa honor levels... i'm 20 or so bfa honor levels away from "unlocking" a mount that i unlocked in legion. pretty impressive to have so many problems with the game that things like that get by mostly unnoticed by the majority or seem so irrelevant that nobody really cares about it.
Anyone staying in wow at this point are either
1 - Battered wife-like players who know how bad it is but think that if they stick it out Craptivision will stop being shit all the time (Most content creators are here)
2 - Newcomers who don't know the mess they are getting into
3 - Stockholm syndrome fanboys with no self worth who actually ENJOY having Craptivision shit on them and shrug off any criticism from the "haters"
I haven't played wow for many years, but I've continued to watch on from a distance. Really sad to see what has happened to a game that so many people loved/love. Hope things can turn around. Great stuff Preach as always.
My favourite trinket had its animation nerfed in 8.1 for absolutely no reason. It looked great and now it looks like a shitty vanilla animation. I wonder what the thought process was behind that? Probably the same thought process to the rest of this patch, a bunch of pointless changes marketed as 'content'. I've unsubbed, looking forward to classic.
You gotta wonder what goes through their minds at Blizzard. They waste so much time changing things that don't need it while things that are still broken never get fixed. Complete shit show over at Blizz HQ.
Out of curiosity, what trinket?
@@VileVamp Merektha's Fang
Not even going to play classic. I've had my fill playing on Nost.. and Elysium and Kronos.. moving on with wow is the best thing ive done
@@Fleshbag453 Of course but I don't need to be subbed until Classic.
I thought long and hard about leaving the game I loved and have played for the last 13 years' a couple of months ago and I'm honestly glad I did, nothing has changed since if anything it only seems to be getting worse. I applaud those that have decided to stick with it and I'm sorry you have to suffer through what seems like a nightmare.
I don't want to point finger at Activision, because I have no solid proof and it is possible what I notice comes from Blizzard higher-ups themselves... but...
The mess with BfA comes, in my opinion, from absolutely pacified middle-to-upper management.
There is no one left there who will be willing to take tough calls, afraid for being blamed if their choice turns out to be a bad one.
Azerite Gear, which perhaps looked okay on paper at first, turned out to be a mess, but no one said "okay. It's time to pull the plug on this shit and start over." because it would change the release date by few months. Would you tell the top brass that you *think* main BfA feature is shit and you won't meet the deadline?
Even if you would, no one would listen to your gut feelings. Unless you bring a spreadsheet showing profit loss, no one will take you seriously.
State of complete pacification continues with no one willing to take the hit for communicating unpopular changes. If there is no one to blame, no one is punished. Everything is fine.
I've worked closely with a number of large companies and with their internal management on HR and internal ethics committees. Any company's executives that repeatedly respond to raised concerns by saying "it's about communication/this will be fixed with communication" are never about communication and are off in their own little world.
Your option at this point is sadly either: Get used to it or leave. Only once their company fails will they learn their lesson. There is no other way.
I'm really disappointed that I got the 6 month sub mount pre 8.1. I would have never subbed for 6 months and I'd be unsubbed till at least next raid tier if I had known the current shit storm that was about to happen.
Mike, thank you for being our voice. I was so excited yesterday when I finally got to login and see all these things. My pants not working, changes to AK... I work as an elementary school teacher, I do not have loads and loads of time to grind this stuff. WoW is getting further and further away because I feel like it is no longer meant for someone like me to enjoy. It is meant for someone who has 9 hours a day to devote to the game.
The signs have been clear for awhile now. Do you guys keep up with the news for any of Blizzard's other games?
Outside of Diablo 4 getting shafted for "Diablo Immortal", let's do a quick review:
Continued drama for Overwatch. Pro Team and Roster changes, season changes, salary changes, sponsorship rules changing, etc, etc, etc. Viewership on both Twitch and for esports event has been down for well over 6 months now.
Heroes of The Storm getting developers moved to "new projects". Their esports scene was officially cancelled for next year.
World of Warcraft has obvious issues that don't need to be talked about again, overall global subs are speculated to be at all time low.
Hearthstone: The only money-maker they seem to have left, but still riddled with issues and bugs, not to mention a poorly implemented esports scene and absolutely disgusting pay for Pro players.
Let's just face the music eh? In fact, while we're doing the thing with the music....why not just dance to a different tune altogether?
Here are 3 alternative, highly popular MMORPGS:
1. Final Fantasy 14 - Huge playerbase. Fully customizable player housing. Play every class on one character if you wish. Tab-targeting combat and similar action bar and UI as WoW. Dungeons, raids, quests, intricate crafting, etc. Box Price + Sub fee, just like WoW. Flying is available. Graphics slightly more realistic looking than WoW, but still quite stylized.
2. Guild Wars 2 - Huge playerbase. Semi-Action Combat System. Very in-depth character builds and development. Huge worlds and many expansions to explore. Dungeons, raids, questing, and giant world vs. world pvp. Base game is free, expansions cost $30-$40. The game stays at level 80, no matter if playing free base game or xpac. No gear grind. Mounts only available via purchase of 1st xpac, gliders available via purchase of 2nd xpac. Semi-stylized graphics that look more realistic than WoW or FF.
3. Elder Scrolls Online - Large Playerbase. Fully customizable player housing. Full Action Combat. Incredibly in-depth character development and builds, with no class locking for different skills and weapons. You could actually be a plate armor-wearing mage. : )
Incredibly in-depth crafting and unique guild system. Ultimate RPG experience imo. Box price for base game + expansions, monthly sub fee is entirely optional. Game stays at level 50. Further character progression is done via MASSIVE, nearly-never-ending talent trees. Gear upgrades via dungeons and raids with each new patch/xpac. Entire zone dedicated to open world pvp as well as "random battlegrounds". Ground mounts given free @ lvl 10 (alts can use them at lvl 1), but no flying. Very nearly photo-realistic graphics.
Another MMO? No thanks.
My MMO career dies with WoW, i am DONE with companies ruining games online.
If wow dies - ill go back to "caveman" style and only play Offline games, you know ---- that never change.
@@Catjamfan The amount of "games are service" we see nowadays makes me think that finding a game without online requirement is becoming harder and harder every year. So not sure how long you can be a "caveman" in modern times :/
Your first point was one of the reasons I loved WoW over every other MMO. The crispness of the controls, no slight delay between the button press to action on the screen. But BFA, this all turned around, quite often there has been lag. Especially if you go into some weird shards where it just puts your latency up and wont drop til you leave that shard.
Sounds like blizzard is still trying to get rid of people's gold.
i started watching your videos pretty recently i love them! i have to catch you on twitch so i can watch you live thanks for the great videos! :)
jesus...i've been debating canceling my sub for a while, but i was gonna give blizz a chance on 8.1, but this...this...level of fucking over everyone in so many ways and not even telling or warning us is pretty unforgivable. i suspect i'll be canceling it now, not sure i can really hang around for all this screwing.
Between the AK debacle, the mythic keystone non-deletion change, and now the news about pulling the plug on HOTS and its eSports...
Like a one-two punch to the gut followed by a knockout punch to the face. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain."
Just a few years ago Blizzard was easily one of the bright spots in the gaming world; now they are a total joke. I would like to blame it on Activision but at some point the devs and other employees need to take responsibility for their own actions or get in the unemployment line. This is a complete disgrace.
MrCircusanimal part of that reason is their inability to attract good talent. Blizzard is known in the industry for exceptionally low pay, in one of the more expensive areas of the US. I’ve worked in the industry for almost ten years, in that time I’ve talked to many people who have got offers from Blizzard, every one was insultingly low for the level of experience they wanted for the position. “But blizzard is cool to work for” only goes so far when you have a family to feed.
Combine that with the current political landscape in America, and you hardly wonder why so many top tier developers refuse to work there.
Ya get what ya pay for, if you offer terrible pay, you get terrible employees.
They need hire the old team back and get new genius team to work magic but that takes $$$
Frank Todo will never happen, or rather, will never happen at what they are willing to pay.
To add on to something you asked of concerning if people stopped with their azerite levels: I did, and exactly at 29. I was really only playing since before 8.1 for alts, but recently a friend came back and I've leveled up my disc priest. While my friend plays I will continue to do stuff they want to do(they trying out pvp for the first time), but once the well runs dry I'm done with azerite again. Really just playing alts to have a feel for their legion storyline quests(I have 8 classes done and at 110), and sort of hoping something fun is salvaged, but at this rate I don't think I'll be around for 8.2 sadly.
most of the changes feel like blizzard making us play the game how they want it, and it is not fun at all.
Like Asmongold has stated, "Rats in a skinner box"
We went from having 27 people dedicated to raiding to 6 active people. Additionally, I’ve been raiding with another guild and this happened to me. Had leather working had my 385 pants and switched to herbalism alchemy because gold but my pants where fine spent way way way to much gold to fix the damn problem. To have them reverse it. Hey blizz give me back my 37k in gold!
I unsubscribed, and I don't miss WoW at all. Been playing pretty much consistently since 2004. It has never been this bad imo.
Thxs for the vid preach sad to hear all the problems wow as atm . Love the vid keep up the good work
I stopped raiding when they got rid of 10-man, loved to do 10-man heroics. Seems stupid to remove them when Blizzard is limited by their own tech.
25-man raids always made me lag to high hell and I hated that they became the norm. Haven't touched Uldir to this day.
I loved the 10 person raid size. It was perfect if you had a smaller build. However that is somewhat mitigated because non-mythic raids scale from 10 to 30 people.
Yeah they never got rid of 10 mans. They made all raids scale so you're still able to do 10 mans. If anything its a little better because if you schedule a 10 man and 11 people log in, you dont have to tell one person the news that "yeah you're sitting around for 4 hours to see if someone else has to go"
Blizz has made tons and tons of shitty choices. This wasnt one of them.
@@booradley6832 he's obviously talking about 10 man heroic which is now mythic (forced 20)
>Heroic isnt hard enough for me
>mythic is too hard because it doesnt cater to the exact game settings I want
Thanks for making me actually sympathetic towards the shit blizz puts up with.
Oh boy I was waiting on this after Twitter yesterday
Communication is key in any relationship, in and out of WOW. When dialogue stops bad things happen.
Not sure why everybody is angry, don't you know Blizz is a $5 indie company give them a break XD
Kinda just stumbled onto this. You're a man who speaks on my level. /sub'd
Its been what 15 years of game development, and literally every game has the same problems that existed in 2003. We get new servers, new optimizations, new graphics, new everything, and yet games still are stuck with the same small scale combat. Look at Eve Online, it is a basic game, that is older than WoW, the only way they can get such large scale combat they have, is to slow everything down to a crawl. You would think that after all these leaps and bounds increases in game design, someone would have invented server architecture and hardware to run a game with hundreds and thousands of players in a single area by now. Our computers can handle it, it is the server architecture that is the issue. You cant tell me that my 1080TI, 32g Ram, SSD and I7 cant handle WoW on that scale, it is their servers, server architecture, and optimization that is the problem. They haven't invested money into it.
Private servers have better server performance than Blizzard when it comes to number of players in an area. It is their hardware and network coding.
The thing with servers is that while they hardware that is much, MUCH more powerful than what you have right now, the problem is that they suffer from massive diminishing returns when it comes to having people all in 1 spot.
For example: If you have a massive 500 player battle in 1 area, the server has to calculate and validate (to prevent cheaters) every single action every single player makes, and then push the changes to every single player in the area. This makes it so having a 1v1 takes relatively no resources at all because if a player casts Fire Bolt and it deals 29 damage for example, the server would need to receive this request, confirm it's not an invalid request (IE, someone trying to force a second or thousands of firebolt cast(s) through hacking while currently on the gcd), and then it push the new values (health, relevant debuffs, etc) to the 2 players.
But if you take that same player and he casts firebolt in a 500 player situation, it does the same request and validation as before, however, it then proceeds to push all the changes to 500 people, making that same firebolt cast cost *over 250x more* system resources and bandwidth to push to the players without additional optimizations, which is far harder to implement than you might think. Keep in mind that this is for only 1 cast, in a 500 player situation there is going to be a hell of a lot more firebolt casting and other spells going around.
As a result: You have to get incredibly crafty as you have to implement tons of tricks while simultaneously avoid opening the server/game up to exploits. Cheating was much less prevalent in vanilla wow, so not nearly as much concern was put into preventing cheaters as there is today (remember editing out the floor in the game files to skip straight to c'thun, or being able to edit out entire mountains to get to GM island?).
Furthermore: Vanilla wow was also designed with optimizations meant for far weaker servers in mind, the 8/16 debuff limit is the prime example of what was probably one of those optimizations. Another "optimization" was the massively reduced amount of boss mechanics. Private servers such as Nostalrius are working with much, MUCH more powerful server hardware and likely even additional optimizations that vanilla wow did not have.
While retail has unlimited debuffs and far, FAR more complex boss mechanics, neither of which would be easy on any server.
So the problem isn't that they haven't invested money into it, but rather they are suffering from ever increasing diminishing returns that they decided it would be a much better idea to just focus on smaller scale content and sharding (less players in the exact same area) with more complexity.
@@Happigail_Adams you are flat wrong, they switched to cloud based virtual servers that they spin up and wind down based on the number of players and cause the sharding, they are unable to handle the content. It was purely a cost saving measure so they didn't have to pay for hardware, upkeep, cooling, and power consumption.
Servers existing that can handle everything that is required, but they won't use them, to save money.
Cloud based servers aren't magic, they still use datacenters and hardware just like any other server. The difference is that blizzard is not the one responsible for hardware upkeep, they still have to keep up optimization on software as well as abide by any other limitation any other high end server would have.
Cloud servers even have distinct advantages which contradict your claims that they are "weaker", they can easily be scaled, reduces the possibility of a client getting disconnected from the server, and unlimited storage. Furthermore, the biggest disadvantage is that it is *more expensive*. But it is more powerful and often better managed.
@@Happigail_Adams you are still wrong, the private WoW server community has dealt with the same issues. They can't use sharding so they just use powerful servers. They handle the scale of players fine on the better servers
This is purely trying to save money on the back end done by companies.
Private servers in other games such as first person shooters are able to double the capacity of "official" servers.
Are you really going to say that the piss poor performance that official servers have is because their servers are better? That is absurd on its face.
From my first post "Vanilla wow was also designed with optimizations meant for far weaker servers in mind, the 8/16 debuff limit is the prime example of what was probably one of those optimizations. Another "optimization" was the massively reduced amount of boss mechanics. Private servers such as Nostalrius are working with much, MUCH more powerful server hardware and likely even additional optimizations that vanilla wow did not have. While retail has unlimited debuffs and far, FAR more complex boss mechanics, neither of which would be easy on any server."
A lot of arbitrary limitations in vanilla is specifically to optimize it for the best server hardware of the era in which it was released in, as well as limiting bandwidth usage as much as possible for dial up users, Nostalrius has far more powerful hardware than vanilla was designed for and is not concerned about dial up users as dial up is a thing of the past.
Retail does not have a lot of those limitations such as the aforementioned debuff limit and is far more complex in mechanics. It is utilizing the more powerful hardware in a different way to Nostalrius.
Blizzard chose complexity over scale, which is why you see bosses and some quests in later expansions to be far more mechanically heavy than anything vanilla has ever had.
Simply put: They built retail around a smaller scale, more complex world, rather than large scale pvp/world bosses scenario. You can't pick both complex mechanics and large scale battles in a server, you can only pick one.
Funny Preach, I just looked and you hit the nail on the head, I'm currently neck level 29. I don't Heroic raid, and TBH I can't be assed to grind shit, so I've just been getting it while going for Exalted reputations.
bring on classic lmao
It's like the stealth detection on groups of mobs in M+ to spite the fact people skipped them because they are too much of a pain or imbalanced compared to other dungeons just to spite them it seems instead of balancing the power of certain dungeons and/or trash packs.
This honestly might be the first expansion where I unsub out of the game being awful rather than burnout because I enjoyed playing it. I see absolutely no reason to defend them considering how blatantly they don't care about the game outside of how much money it's making. As much as I get it's also a "funny" meme that some of these changes are Blizzards middle finger to everyone's complaints, I wouldn't doubt if that's actually what they are doing. Some of these changes seem like they are intended for nothing else than to literally just piss people off.
Sidenote: Is there any way to compare the team behind Legion to the team behind BFA? Or any other expansion really. I want to see how the team changed from MoP through BFA.
all they had to do was put all of these azerite traits directly onto the heart of azeroth necklace where you would unlock more and more slots and you could cherry pick which traits you could put into each slot that you unlocked per level of azerite power. and they could have kept tier armor on top of that. they also could have made warfronts PVP and it would have made it so much better. and the gathering quests for resources for the war front could have been WORLD pvp quests that require war mode to be on to keep people out in the world during warfront cycles.
correct me if i'm wrong but all of this could have been done easily and it would have been much better.
what happened to "drama" that you uploaded the other day mate?
its coming, i dont like uploading more than once a day and burying my own stuff. This vid had to take priority. For reference though Drama is instantly availible immediately after its recorded on twitch.tv/preachlfw You never have to wait for YT but i also understand YT is more conveniant for many.
I'm subbed, but I'm casual these days as work and life keeps me busy. Leveling alts and doing some dungeons and such. But if I were raiding hardcore again, I can see why the changes might be enough quit. I think we all hope they right the ship and learn to communicate.
Thanks for voicing the perspective of the working adult with kids and limited time to play. I am one of them too ;)
I've been playing since vanilla and even in WoD I still felt like logging in to do something. These days outside of the odd raid I just log on, check my auctions and leave. A game I've loved for 14 years is in a sorry state when I have had more fun playing MINECRAFT for the lols.
love how you made the subtle distinction between people and alliance :DD
I love you preach. You just spoke my feelings. I stopped playing like 2 months ago tired of how horrible bfa had become, I waited for the patch hoping to get the game I paid for, I logged in on patch day and in like 3 days I've found dozens of bugs, things not working right, things that got changed without any notice and an amount of content that is just too little for the time we have waited and where most of this content is fixing things that should be working like that at the start of the expansion. I feel so sad man, I love this game I just feel blizzard wants to make us hate it...
I can easily say the ONLY (and I mean only) reason I am still subbed is to raid Mythic with my guild two nights a week.
I’ve never gotten to “Raid, do weekly upkeep requirments (for my guild it’s just one +10 now..) and log off”.
I just want to feel excited to come home and log onto WoW again..
I am reminded of early Diablo 3.
I remember the patch where Blizzard changed Wizards' Force Armor without telling anyone or putting it in the patch notes.
Countless Hardcore Wizards died that day, because of a stealth change to a core defensive ability. And Blizzard's official stance on restoring those characters was "Nope. Never. Doesn't matter why it happened."
That day my opinion of Blizzard took a severe hit. That was inexcusable no matter how you looked at it. It's been downhill since. Like they just do not give a flying rat's ass about their players anymore.
Love the work you put in Preach.
Preach... we need a story telling... what ever happened to those. Was lovely to sit and chuckle at those... so serious now :/
It’s pretty tragic on a whole and the affect on remainers trying to get the most out of a game with dwindling numbers creates bad attitudes and animosity in guilds. My 6th guild this expac never known it to be this rough .
Loving these new videos. Good stuff!
@Preach Gaming the crafted gear change was on the ptr 1.5 weeks before 8.1 launched, possibly longer, when I noticed it at least
lets face facts here. Blizzard have gone from making a game they love to being snake oil salesmen. The sickening reality is that spreedsheets to maximise profits have replaced their make their game amazing mentality.
I hope Blizz comms team see this, fella. I hope it’s addressed in the Q&A. Balanced, critical and questioning journalism in a sea of outrage.
Loving that Bastion Soundtrack in the background.
Thanks Preach. I know that you hate doing those and I want your positive videos about classes and such like in the past, but....yeah tough times.
Preach I love your content - I’ve played since vanilla (didn’t play wrath and wod tho) this is my only game I play, wow is my happy place **was** my happy place...full time worker and dad and sadly all this BS has made me
Not play....feels bad man can’t wait for classic - thanks for being real