301–310 of 557 posts
They have lost the ability to innovate.
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> I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: "The Blizzard Way" doesn't work anymore. Fortnite releases content monthly/quarterly. Massive updates with huge out-of-game tie-ins, changing worlds, in-game events, etc. Other games have changed to match/compete. CoD and Valorant both implement similar season-pass style systems. Blizzard, on the other hand, insists on delaying/cancelling games, releasing "o…
This analysis is probably correct, but it's also depressing as hell because Fortnite is a shallow, money-hungry game. Nothing like Blizzard's best work from the past (Diablo 2, Starcraft) that could be played for years with no "season passes" or other MTX.
Hate to take offense to this, but as someone who plays Fortnite competitively, it is absolutely not shallow. It's so much more than just another FPS.
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Overwatch is a frustrating game to play because they almost have it right. It's almost there, if they could just tweak a couple things. A good example is the overtime system. One of the worst ideas in games I've run into. For one, it creates artificial and spiky emotions in players, which just burns people out. It's amazing they don't realize basic things like that, which means they actually haven't had the right tal…
This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?
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"Trust me, you think you want it, but you don't" - Blizzard, about vanilla WoW, a year before releasing WoW Classic.
The thing with most companies optimizing addiction (user engagement) is that they use these weird optimization loops that improve metrics one by one (+x% then +y%) but then end up with a product so far from the long-term equilibrium. There's no context as to what each player wants. The loop just works across the whole player base, not really aimed towards any context of the player.
They keep milking the same aging WoW userbase, of course it'll decline, since that demographic is becoming old enough to not care anymore Their business decision to re-release WoW with WoW: Classic was a poor one They should have made either a sequel, or a full REMAKE, not a lazy-milking-re-release, it just plain stupid And let's not talk about the way they "reforged" Warcraft 3.. They print lot of money, but sadly i…
The community would have lost its mind if Blizzard tried anything like a remake, purely because Blizzard has spent all the goodwill it had a long time ago and did nothing to make people think it wouldn't conk it up. To the point everybody was knee-jerkingly refusing any change at all to the game, regardless of how minor or justifiable it would be (which was a mistake, Classic would have been much better with some increased difficulty).
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This is the first time I'm hearing any complaints about the modern overtime system. It seems totally fair to me, the defending team has to actually win the final fight. What would you change about it?
oh it's fair, but extremely frustrating to lose after 60 seconds of overtime
I hate getting just completely run over way more, personally.
I've been an off-and-on World of Warcraft player since the Burning Crusade days, and I honestly think that Blizzard is struggling to evolve the MMORPG genre into something suitable for the modern day. There was a great article in Kotaku[1] that illustrated this quite nicely. Essentially, what made World of Warcraft successful when it launched can't really exist today, especially with our hyper-connected world. Blizza…
Blizzard hasn't produced even one single-player-focused game since... Diablo I? Their strength has always been multiplayer, I very much doubt they could deliver a blockbuster single-player open world game.
However I think that was the model of many of the older games. Once the game has been developed and released, single player improvements are largely either bugs, quality of life improvements or platform changes. The first 2 were needed less because of old school blizzard's dedication to quality.
From my point of view, Blizzard has been slowly going downhill for ages. Some whines in chronological order: WoW died for me when they introduced the random dungeon finder in Cataclysm and cut down the player-to-player interaction outside dungeons by 99%. Starcraft 2 ... might have been polished and all, but honestly I don't see much difference from Starcraft 1. Also, I don't like memorizing openings (either chess or…
So true about WoW. Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. They also took the sense of enormity out of the world because you don't have to physically go places anymore. The deeprun tram, boats, zepplins were all such elegant solutions to create a breathtakingly open and connected world, and flying mounts & dungeon finder killed the feeling so quick…
Being able to do things alone was always part of the design, but they made it where even the group things could be done "alone." It's nice to remove friction and pain points, but if you make the entire game frictionless there is no game left, just mindless queuing and loot collecting.
You can thank MBAs for the demise of every American company. MBAs are the reason China will eat the US.
MBAs and excessive IP protections. The Warcraft 3 mapping community spawned entire new game genres and franchises. Warcraft 3 Reforged style TOSs means that probably won't happen again.
By the time they released their own version, Heroes of the Storm, it was too late.
Not to mention many other MOBAs that are direct copies of DotA such as Heroes of Newerth and many others.
That, and projects like Diablo 4 were the signs that Blizzard is now dead inside and starting to rot.
No sane person would make those decisions. Those decisions can only happen when a company is ran by powerpoint-oriented people that is disconnected from the customers.
I can't say what's driving all the playerbase losses but: They stopped development on Diablo 3 a long time ago. It doesn't have the staying power of more modern online games where new content is added continuously. They stopped development on HotS, which never achieved the same level of pull as League of Legends. Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has over…
> Overwatch faces stiff competition from Valorant and other competitive small team FPSes, and also has overlapping audiences with battle royale FPSes. The competition isn't driving away people from Overwatch. The game is incredibly stale, and IMO, is probably the death knell of full price online games. There has been little to none new content and changes to the game. The competitive community has always complained a…
This is what I would describe as the state of Overwatch. After sinking thousands of hours in this game, I stopped playing my favorite game because Blizzard didn't care.
1. They pretty much gave up on any new content for OW2 development. 2. Competitive was broken from the beginning. Good behavior was rarely rewarded and bad behavior was rarely punished. Most of my games were grind really hard to win and get 100SR, only to have two consecutive games where people would leave early and then lose 4v6 or 3v6 and have that SR disappear. 3. Elo hell was real. I was in Bronze because that's where I started from when I began the game, but eventually when I got better, I could never jump out of the ELO hell. I ultimately had to create a new account, and lo and behold I was immediately placed in Diamond. 4. SR awards were bs. I was a Moira main who'd get 40 kills and pretty much own the game, but just because Moira is rewarded on healing and there was a Lucio on the team, you barely get any SR for carrying your team, meanwhile Lucio reaps all the SR. 5. The event based content was so bad, recycled game modes from 3 years ago, recycled skins, recycled pretty much everything. 6. PvE modes were garbage. 7. Lootboxes were so frustrating, I at one point spent $50 to buy a fuck ton on lootboxes for a special event that had a ton of legendary skins, I managed to get just 1. Had a ton of repeats, that have minimal payoff. 8. Constant meta changes were brutal towards the end. Everything that came after Brig was just ridiculous. 9. 2-2-2 was BS. 3-3 was worse. 10. Everything, EVERYTHING was more catered to OWL than the player base.
At some point these MBA types who don't game, decided what's best for making more money and went ahead on executing in that direction. Player base was forgotten. And that has been pretty much the state of OW and all the Blizzard IP.