World of Warcraft is releasing content non-stop, but the quality is at rock bottom. Only the emergency brake can help, finds MeinMMO demon Cortyn.
It is too much.
World of Warcraft is experiencing a flood of content that not only overwhelms the player base but also seems to be quite troublesome for the developers. It is time for Blizzard to pull the emergency brake here – and fast. Because another year like this could harm World of Warcraft in the long run. Negative headlines and criticism of the current content, which some do not even consider as such, are piling up.
I have experienced all phases of the content of World of Warcraft:
- The time when there was a patch only every 5 to 6 months.
- The time when you had to wait over a year for new content.
- And now the time when there is a new update with new content every 6 to 8 weeks.
But it is painfully obvious that Blizzard cannot maintain its own claims to quality. The Game Director can appear in interviews as often as he wants and say that they have a fast cadence with patches without sacrificing quality – it simply is not true. With Patch 12.0.5, it was even so obvious that Blizzard publicly apologized for the condition of a patch at launch for the first time in a very, very long time.
Content that is simply not finished
The most prominent example from Patch 12.0.5 was the “Decor Duel,” that is the “Prop Hunt” game mode, where one side disguises as furniture and the other team has to search for them.
Nothing about this mode was ready for release at all. Just a small (non-exhaustive) list of bugs and issues:
- Whoever hides too well was marked as “afk” and received no reward.
- You could hide “outside the map” and become virtually unreachable.
- Hunters could see other players on the map with a certain ability.
- Who wins or loses is random, as the game does not count properly. Thus, it may say that one team found 9 or even 10 opponents. And that, although there are only 6 characters per side.
The result was that many avoided this game mode while others found a clear strategy: Both sides simply do not hide. They clearly line up directly in front of the starting point of the searcher so that everyone is immediately found and the round ends, allowing them to get the resource of this “event” as quickly as possible.
This is nothing less than a complete disgrace. In Overwatch, the Prop Hunt mode was brilliant. It was well thought out and was one of the most enjoyable gaming experiences I ever had. They really should have just transferred exactly this mode to WoW. Instead, there was buggy crap that only brings little joy even in its (now) somewhat functioning version. It is a means to an end for a few special housing items.
And that is just one example. I could talk for a long time about the Overflow Event or Abyss Fishing, which are plagued by very similar issues.
WoW forgets what it has learned
Furthermore, there are also clearly recognizable regressions in the design of the content. For various reasons, it becomes clear that lessons from the past have apparently been forgotten again:
- Enemies in dungeons and raids do not have clearly telegraphed abilities. This was something that was specifically introduced with The War Within to create more clarity. In Midnight, some bosses have very vague attacks, the exact hit zones of which are hard to perceive.
- Transmog rewards for the rituals are awarded randomly. You have to buy “loot boxes” that contain a transmog piece for a random class. It is not possible to deterministically buy the set for your own class. This was a lesson from the past: People want to buy precisely what they need.
How can it be that these lessons have been lost between two expansions? The reason seems obvious: Different teams work on different contents. This has also been confirmed in the past, after all, we know that a separate team has been working on “The Last Titan” for a long time.
But there seems to be alarmingly little communication between these teams. If the same people who worked on the content of The War Within had looked at the new content of the other team for just one or two days, these problems would have become apparent immediately.
Blizzard, I say this with all the sincere love I have for World of Warcraft in my heart: Stop with this pace. You cannot do it. Absolutely every little patch of the last two years has had launch issues and was simply not finished. Take two to four more weeks or reduce the number of features. Because a side effect of this flood is that more and more of my friends are suffering from a kind of “WoW burnout” – but I will tell you about that on Mecker Wednesday in a few days…
Meanwhile, there is also quite different criticism of World of Warcraft that housing fans have been making increasingly clear in recent weeks. The monetization is aggressively striking and the packages are getting more expensive. This costs not only money but also the love for WoW for many players.
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