FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[Ralph2449]

This is a design decision that the game director actively makes to have professions be next to useless, content outside of raiding be useless and have incredibly strange ways of allowing casuals to progress. You do not see this in FF14 because on day 1 of the new patch you could get 510 ilvl penta melded crafted gear, on day 1 tokens for 510 gear

Oh yeah it is clear it is a dev problem, especially after an interview with a pvp dev that left blizzard that revealed their process in many decisions including refusing to balance for months on end which is why I dont believe the problem is simply one dev, they argue and agree together on things so there's a big number of devs who hold the similar mentality of seeing casual content as something "inferior" or simply focusing and protecting their "elite" high end players above all which has the same result really.

The issue with WoW right now is that even if the dev team completely changes from the ground up, the community has degenerated far too much in all levels of play, the amount of tryhards, meta slaves and elitists are everywhere even in low end content, and mythic is even worse because you are expected to be a complete metaslave tryhard, they have completely forgotten what was meant to be play a class or spec for fun or even the challenge of trying to think and figure out how your own comb could deal with a boss' mechanics, all those have been abandoned for their pursuit of prestige and we are talking about guilds that are very very far from World first so it doesnt matter how fast they clear, they wont lose anything other than prestige which sadly their self worth and ego lies on.


The devs nurtured that attitude and unhealthy mentality by repeatedly focusing and pushing high end content at the expense of everything else, by refusing to balance classes leading to broken specs that last and are being abused for 6 months or more, by never really doing much about toxic behavior so their community knows there's no point to even report anything since nothing would happen anyway unless 30 people reported them at the same time.

And when a community is so unhealthy I dont think there's any way to fix it because the way things are now people either accept that mentality or leave which of course makes the game pretty unfriendly to new or casual players. You can always subtly influence a community as a game dev but once you created a monster it is almost impossible to control without extreme measures. (And seeing how they completely dropped the ball on faction balance and let it go out of control I doubt they ll do anything for this)

FF14 has WoW beat in most areas design wise, especially on casual content and the few positives that are left in WoW are completely overshadowed by a terrible community which you cant avoid because they are everywhere, and it gets even worse if you want to do high end content.

[Amnmaat]

Oh yeah it is clear it is a dev problem, especially after an interview with a pvp dev that left blizzard that revealed their process in many decisions including refusing to balance for months on end which is why I dont believe the problem is simply one dev, they argue and agree together on things so there's a big number of devs who hold the similar mentality of seeing casual content as something "inferior" or simply focusing and protecting their "elite" high end players above all which has the same result really.

The issue with WoW right now is that even if the dev team completely changes from the ground up, the community has degenerated far too much in all levels of play, the amount of tryhards, meta slaves and elitists are everywhere even in low end content, and mythic is even worse because you are expected to be a complete metaslave tryhard, they have completely forgotten what was meant to be play a class or spec for fun or even the challenge of trying to think and figure out how your own comb could deal with a boss' mechanics, all those have been abandoned for their pursuit of prestige and we are talking about guilds that are very very far from World first so it doesnt matter how fast they clear, they wont lose anything other than prestige which sadly their self worth and ego lies on.

I've seen that in too many mmorpgs; Wakfu and Blade and Soul to name just two. The "elite" or high level community grabs the developers by the hand and do everything short of threatening to cater to them only. Any casual player suggests making the majority of the game accessible by normal/casual players and you get chopped to bits before your voice ever reaches the devs. I'm glad YoshiP set a tone from the beginning that he will listen to those of us who value accessibility of content before all else. Difficulty only gets you so far, accessibility gets you a healthy community who believe in you because you believe in them in return. In return those who want harder content are rarely if ever challenged or criticized. Want more difficulty? Go ahead and ask it, you won't see too many casuals berate you for asking for harder content, as long as it's not required for the casual crowd.

So yes, world of warcraft is a decades-long experiment on sadism and masochism. You lose so many years hoping blizzard will ever listen to the casuals, you'll get old as hell waiting on blizzard to stop catering to hardcore streamers. FFXIV is one of the few last standing accessible mmorpgs.

[Rae88]

So yes, world of warcraft is a decades-long experiment on sadism and masochism. You lose so many years hoping blizzard will ever listen to the casuals, you'll get old as hell waiting on blizzard to stop catering to hardcore streamers. FFXIV is one of the few last standing accessible mmorpgs.

Love your post and agree But I think most of the top RPGs these days are really accessible. FFXIV, ESO, and GW2 are all really nice and casual and chill I think really only WoW and BDO are pretty elitist, with WoW holding the top raiders attention and endgame PvP in BDO being dominated by pay to win players I think

[Vahlnir]

So yes, world of warcraft is a decades-long experiment on sadism and masochism. You lose so many years hoping blizzard will ever listen to the casuals, you'll get old as hell waiting on blizzard to stop catering to hardcore streamers.

I can't believe I'm saying this right now but...I kind of agree. It certainly feels that way. I guess the only difference between me and those who remain is that I walked away.

[Penthea]

Oh yeah it is clear it is a dev problem, especially after an interview with a pvp dev that left blizzard that revealed their process in many decisions including refusing to balance for months on end which is why I dont believe the problem is simply one dev, they argue and agree together on things so there's a big number of devs who hold the similar mentality of seeing casual content as something "inferior" or simply focusing and protecting their "elite" high end players above all which has the same result really.

The issue with WoW right now is that even if the dev team completely changes from the ground up, the community has degenerated far too much in all levels of play, the amount of tryhards, meta slaves and elitists are everywhere even in low end content, and mythic is even worse because you are expected to be a complete metaslave tryhard, they have completely forgotten what was meant to be play a class or spec for fun or even the challenge of trying to think and figure out how your own comb could deal with a boss' mechanics, all those have been abandoned for their pursuit of prestige and we are talking about guilds that are very very far from World first so it doesnt matter how fast they clear, they wont lose anything other than prestige which sadly their self worth and ego lies on.

Oh man you just reminded me of something that is equal parts hilarious and deeply depressing.

I remember back in Cataclysm when the second tier of that expansion had its release date announced, Blizzard also announced they would nerf what would become the previous tier. I didn't care because at that point it was already considered to be outdated content because it was out for sooo long already (tiers were super long, much much longer than in FF). Any halfway decent raid team had already cleared it at least several weeks before the announcement, and when a new tier released the older tier always ended up being abandoned because frankly no one cares about kills from when the content was already old. If a tier got nerfs during when the content was relevant then having your kill dated before the nerf was considered very noteworthy, and a kill after the nerf often considered as not very strong depending on the nature of the nerf and when it came in the tier. The raiding community was so strict on what was seen as a demonstration of skill. I expect it's still like this today.

Anyway while I didn't think nerfing outdated content was a problem, all the tryhards came out of the woodwork and complained about how Blizzard were ruining the game to appease filthy casuals. No amount of explaining that it's outdated content calmed them down. All they were interested in was bashing the supposed casual monster that was out of control spreading its disease in content it had no right to touch. Meanwhile myself and others who were actual hardcore raiders were looking upon this thinking "omg what is wrong with you...". I never forgot how ridiculous that situation was. And spoiler alert: nerfing that tier didn't magically turn the entire raiding scene into a faceroll. It literally had zero impact on it.

And when a community is so unhealthy I dont think there's any way to fix it because the way things are now people either accept that mentality or leave which of course makes the game pretty unfriendly to new or casual players. You can always subtly influence a community as a game dev but once you created a monster it is almost impossible to control without extreme measures. (And seeing how they completely dropped the ball on faction balance and let it go out of control I doubt they ll do anything for this)

Fixing a community problem like this is extremely difficult in a game as old as WoW. It would require a very definitive shift in design choices and players who have been playing the same game for over a decade often don't like being taken out of their comfort zone, even when they're not happy where they are now. Many would be very concerned that the little they like of the game would disappear if too much change happened.

I think WoW is long passed the point of being able to do anything about the community without risking enormous backlash. It's been like this for so long that the state of the community is almost a type of content in itself. It's completely interwoven with the experience of playing the game. It's not impossible to unravel it but doing it correctly would mean playing the long game of gradually introducing content that encourages change over the course of several years. And honestly, I don't think Blizzard can be bothered to do that because WoW already makes millions as it is. It won't be seen as a worthy investment.

[Garet]

Fixing a community problem like this is extremely difficult in a game as old as WoW. It would require a very definitive shift in design choices and players who have been playing the same game for over a decade often don't like being taken out of their comfort zone, even when they're not happy where they are now. Many would be very concerned that the little they like of the game would disappear if too much change happened.

I think WoW is long passed the point of being able to do anything about the community without risking enormous backlash. It's been like this for so long that the state of the community is almost a type of content in itself. It's completely interwoven with the experience of playing the game. It's not impossible to unravel it but doing it correctly would mean playing the long game of gradually introducing content that encourages change over the course of several years. And honestly, I don't think Blizzard can be bothered to do that because WoW already makes millions as it is. It won't be seen as a worthy investment.

Ion admitted as much when asked about how they plan to address the faction imbalance regarding hardcore mythic players and raider in horde and alliance. He said that although they do think about it and are trying to find way to encourage more hardcore players to move back to alliance, that it will take a long time unless they do something excessive in buffing alliance traits etc which is something they obviously do not want to do.

[Rae88]

Ion admitted as much when asked about how they plan to address the faction imbalance regarding hardcore mythic players and raider in horde and alliance. He said that although they do think about it and are trying to find way to encourage more hardcore players to move back to alliance, that it will take a long time unless they do something excessive in buffing alliance traits etc which is something they obviously do not want to do.

They gave Horde ridiculously overpowered racials, allowed the lead singer of a band at Blizzcon to slander Alliance players using anti-LGBT insults, and wonder why the alliance raiding scene is ... non-existent.

"We are trying to address the inbalance, and have been trying for the past 3 years, but it's a social thing, it's all on you". Not interested in your bullshit Ion

[Penthea]

They gave Horde ridiculously overpowered racials

"We are trying to address the inbalance, and have been trying for the past 3 years, but it's a social thing, it's all on you". Not interested in your bullshit Ion

I can't comment on now, even though I played again recently I paid little attention to the racials as I had no intention of raiding. However years ago when I did raid horde was most times seen as the stronger choice for racials. Some very hardcore raiding guilds would even make it mandatory that you played the best race for your class even if the difference was minimal.

I do think though that even if they abolished racials tomorrow it wouldn't fix much because the raiding communities have been established where they are for too long to change faction. There's also this silly idea that some have that the alliance is the pansy faction because the races there are more often conventionally good looking.

It is in part a social issue that there is faction imbalance, but that issue started because of development decisions by Blizzard making one faction a clear choice above the other in the cases of many classes. And don't even get me started on racials in pvp...god some were so stupidly good in that content.

allowed the lead singer of a band at Blizzcon to slander Alliance players using anti-LGBT insult

Oh wow, what is this? Can you please elaborate on what happened?

[Ralph2449]

Oh wow, what is this? Can you please elaborate on what happened?

Yeah that one was crazy, imagine you are in charge of Blizzcon, you see a video where a horde edgelord starts throwing out insults and use derogatory terms for half your playerbase and think "yeah we should totes upload that to blizzcon for everyone to see". It goes to show what kind of people work and influence things in blizzard.

Starts at 5 seconds, they had to non top spam the censoring beep with all the things he said, uncertain if it was censored in the actual blizzcon 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2yvZM1wn04
Uncensored version: his rant starts at 1 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_Lv0r-l4c

Who cares?

They definitely to to improve things in that area, getting my registration mail took so long I ended up closing the "insert registration code here" window assuming there would be a way to get back to that window from the email.

Ended up needing to wait 24 hours to create my account, they def could update the registration process.

[Penthea]

Yeah that one was crazy, imagine you are in charge of Blizzcon, you see a video where a horde edgelord starts throwing out insults and use derogatory terms for half your playerbase and think "yeah we should totes upload that to blizzcon for everyone to see". It goes to show what kind of people work and influence things in blizzard.

Starts at 5 seconds, they had to non top spam the censoring beep with all the things he said, uncertain if it was censored in the actual blizzcon 2011
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2yvZM1wn04
Uncensored version: his rant starts at 1 min https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW_Lv0r-l4c

Oh my god. I'm actually shocked. He was very explicit in his language. No subtlety at all. Full blown highly offensive insults, and he said them with so much arrogant pride. And Blizzard thought this was fine to promote...what?????? Even with the censorship it comes across as cringey at best.

I wonder how this passed me by, I was still playing WoW back then and had already been for many years. Maybe Blizzard somehow managed to insulate the EU playerbase from the controversy? Good god. I'm actually feeling really uncomfortable now. This is all so nasty.