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Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

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Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#531

Post by thaumasiotes »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #120
Jetrel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speak for yourself; I can't stand SC1 after all the quality-of-life features they added to 2. There's nothing dumber and more immersion-breaking than watching 15 dragoons get stuck in a small opening because the game's pathfinding is the very best the mid-90s has to offer. Or watching a reaver's scarab just ... get stuck, on the way to a target. They solved all of this crap (and a whole lot more) in SC2, and I can't…

Dragoon pathing is actually a bug where the dragoons think they're smaller than they are IIRC. They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.

> They just never patched it because it ended up becoming a part of the accepted balance.

I wish people would do this today. Release your game and let the rules be the rules.

Last year, Magic: the Gathering announced "by all our metrics, we consider the metagame healthy. So we're doing something we've never done before: we're banning a bunch of cards purely for the sake of change."

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#532

Post by mathgladiator »

pradn wrote: post #75
Covzire wrote: post #14

I still can't believe they butchered WC3:reforged so badly. It could have been a massive boon for them were it not for the hideously greedy ToS along with all the technical issues and straight up downgrades from the original in terms of multiplayer. There have to be some epic stories of mismanagement or hubris, if only someone would tell them.

It's incredible that a "remaster" could destroy a game like that. I can't even go play a game that I love, a game from my childhood, with an art style and gameplay that still holds up unless I torrent the old client and connect to third-party multiplayer servers. For artists, there's a concept of "moral rights". Art may not be destroyed senselessly, no matter who owns it, because it goes against the human creative sp…

Once of the concepts I'm working on from a technical angle is making stable compute super cheap from an operational perspective and zero maintenance perspective. I can understand companies turning off games because costs grow beyond revenue, so it only makes sense to clean house.

http://www.adama-lang.org/docs/why-keeping-things-stable

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#533

Post by thaumasiotes »

DamnYuppie wrote: post #166
dwaltrip wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve been taking some time away from work recently. I played WoW (classic version) for about three months for the first time ever. I made it to level 47 as a night elf hunter. The environment is beautiful. The fighting is well designed. Dungeons can be a nice social experience. It can be a very fun and relaxing game. But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple forma…

You are in the no mans land of wow leveling in the mid 40's. As a hunter you should be able to blow through to 60 in a few days from 47, it is one of the better classes for solo leveling. The real fun of wow classic is running dungoens and instances with a guild. A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot. I would say join a guild and run instances with them and see if that sparks some of the fun back into it.

> The real fun of wow classic is running dungeons and instances with a guild.

This does nothing to solve the parent's problem:

>> But it gets super repetitive after a while. The quests are all minor variations of a few simple formats.

Instead, your proposed solution makes this much worse.

> A clean run of a 40 man Molten Core run is a hoot.

And this is an... unusual perspective. I raided Molten Core in WoW Classic (the recent release, not the original). It's a huge slog in which the only challenge is mustering the willpower to stay in there for the hours it takes to clear. Once my power cut out during raid, and it came as a big relief.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#534

Post by thaumasiotes »

brianwawok wrote: post #505
ronsor wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These days I'd be weary of running anything Riot puts out since they got that new kernel anti-cheat.

What's the flipside, you want to play with cheaters?

Yes. Very much. The idea that you should be playing games online with strangers you'll never see again has done terrible things to computer games. The solution to cheaters is to tell them "hey, knock it off", because you know them socially. Or to use the same cheats (call them "mods") while playing with them. Or to be so much better that you win anyway. Any of those is better than what we have now.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#535

Post by nottorp »

kcb wrote: post #368
idrios wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. I used to feel this way more but in the past couple of times I picked the game up Raid Finder and Dungeon Finder were completely irrelevant to myself and every player I interacted with. I did 0 Raid Finder and like 2 queued dungeons on my raid geared characters. Having a guild is more important than ever in…

... and how do you find a guild? Apply out-of-game? Play only with r/l friends?

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#536

Post by pythonaut_16 »

TMWNN wrote: post #468
thaumasiotes wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not to mention they seem to hate flying yet keep creating terrible zones unless you can fly. Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like. > There aren't clear routes between common locations like roads in Skyrim. I actually really liked how roads were handled in o…

>Yes, this is just an ongoing disaster. My sense from their communications over the years is that, when players fly through zones, that hurts the feelings of the artists, which Blizzard doesn't like. Flying should never have been allowed in WoW, period. Beyond the whole issue of players skipping content in zones artists spend months building, the mechanism severely distorts gameplay. A player being able to hover, des…

A well balanced stamina mechanic would be a great way to implement flying. (Something along the lines of Valheim and Breath of the Wild's stamina mechanics)

With some tuning not only would it prevent complete flyovers, it could actually be really fun and add another option for progression. Like a basic mechanic where climbing altitude quickly consumes stamina, while gliding consumes it slowly. Add thermal drafts to strategic locations and let the player improve their flying stamina over time.

Now you can limit how much a player can fly and when, and create fun game moments with crash landings in hostile areas when you misjudge your stamina.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#537

Post by pythonaut_16 »

gizmo385 wrote: post #331
raydev wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Fortnite is a shallow 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.

I think Errant Signal has a great video [1] dissecting the appeal and breadth of content in Fortnite. It's not my cup of tea, but I certainly don't think you can call it "shallow". On the other side, Folding Ideas has a great video [2] (that the Errant Signal video references) dissecting the monetization systems in Fortnite and their negative aspects. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNukmNDq60Q [2] https://www.yo…

Monetization systems aside, the game development work on Fortnite is pretty innovative.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#538

Post by cloverich »

me_me_me wrote: post #486
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it that online video games require these steady streams of updates to be viable? Chess hasn't seen an update in, well, I don't actually know the history, a thousand years maybe? Although actually, perhaps a better example would be Smash Brothers Melee...

Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike. Both really old both almost unchanged for years and both have big active communities.

OW is more complex (outside of high ranks). In many cases the changes are meant to balance characters so more combinations are equally viable. when i played TFC way back when, pyro was a worthless character, effectively unused for years. they eventually balanced him; so probably just the far higher number of characters and abilities and desire to make more things viable. OW is gets stale at high elo but at lower ranks it’s whatever people are best at that tend to work within reason. (i quit just before 2/2/2. played silver to diamond)

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#539

Post by 411111111111111 »

nottorp wrote: post #535
kcb wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder made it so you didn't need to find people or be in a guild to do these things. I used to feel this way more but in the past couple of times I picked the game up Raid Finder and Dungeon Finder were completely irrelevant to myself and every player I interacted with. I did 0 Raid Finder and like 2 queued dungeons on my raid geared characters. Having a guild is more important than ever in…

... and how do you find a guild? Apply out-of-game? Play only with r/l friends?

Either through the ingame recruitment tool, whispering guilds from wowprogess that are recruiting Or even city chat.

Blaming lfg/lfr for the current wow community is misguided at best. The rewards from it are just too low for it to have such a large impact.

I mean the game has become pay to win at this point as you can pay real money for ingame gold... Which you can use to get carried through mythic raid/pvp/m+, giving you a gigantic ingame advantage.

This isn't even a niche thing anymore. There are spammers constantly offering carrys for all ingame content.

Re: Blizzard has lost almost 29% of its overall active playerbase in three years

#540

Post by donio »

redisman wrote: post #460
donio wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - MOBA (HotS has been discontinued) Development has certainly slowed down but it's still alive with new content, Hero reworks and balance patches. https://heroespatchnotes.com/patch/summary.html

It’s at a similar patch cadence and size as Warcraft 3. The fall from the good times has been pretty severe

It is slower than we'd like it to be but the breakneck pace of the first couple of years with a new hero ever 3 weeks wouldn't have made sense in the long term either. It was necessary early on to fill out the roster but what the game needs at this stage is regular balance patches and reworks.
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