FF14 devs just keep doing your thing because my god

[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 I didn't care because at that point it was already considered to be outdated content because it was out for sooo long already (tiers were super long, much much longer than in FF).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.