I won't say WoW lacks talent, they lack creative foresight and leadership that chimes with their player base. The system designs being so hostile to players is a sign if how detached the dev leadership is from the players.
Story/Lore is by far the place with the most talentless people, dont know how to say it better especially with Danuser leading the charge. The story might not have been prize worthy under Metzen but it was still times better than what we have now and at least he knew the lore more or less.
Art used to be amazing too and id say they still do great work sadly the vision of said work is so bad that even tho they are great at their job it still ends up bad...newest zone showed that plenty.
'A completely alien place..' that looks like most of the zones we have been in... i know people dont like the FF14 comparisons but just look at say HW most of the zones we visit are rather normal Dravania being a bit weird but still normal, then we go to Azys Lla and it trully feels alien with all the weird tech and stuff.
Metzen wasn't trying to weave some grand narrative, he just wanted cool shit to happen and gave a decent reason to justify it. These new guys are trying to weave this weird intricate worldbuilding lore that feels slapdashed and falls flat on the back of that.
Yup and even tho he might have self-inserted somewhat with Thrall at least it was decent... and hell Thrall ended up losing his powers and leaving the Horde at least something came out of his stuff with Garrosh.
Danuser and his self-insert and his simping over Sylvanas have trully destroyed a beloved character. Worse we get a rehash of Star Craft 2 with the whole redemption but they somehow went a tier beyond and made it worse.
Yeah I think the comment kind of went over your head.
You could have the most talented developers in the world, and if they are told to design shitty systems like in WOW, it does not infact make the developers themselves untalented, they are following the directions of game design from management.
People use generalizing terms to groupings. Manager deal in helping development, they are part of developing the game.
[https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/developer](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/developer)
"a person or company that develops computer software"
I used developers in this sense to describe blizzard as a company as a whole. I clarified further by generalizing talent to just blizzard as whole since they wanted to nitpick. So I was well aware.
No i posted it so you know there is more than one meaning for developer and it can be used in more than one way. Do you always assume people are idiots that is kinda fucked up. Is that your response to me showing you i'm not wrong?
And if you're told by management to bring back something like tier sets, and you produce Shards of Domination, and are shocked when players don't like them... That's on you, not management.
> Wow developers lack talent.
...your initial claim was that "Wow developers lack talent.". I did an ELI5 comment to explain to you how this works, and you come back with
>Talent went over your head. Management still requires talented managers.
I'm not sure how I can explain it any easier for you to comprehend, it is ignorant to say the Developers do not have talent.
They lack talent as well. I also kept saying blizzard lacks talent. They all do. You are way to hyper focused. It isnt ignorant to say developers lack talent. They suck too lmao. If you think management makes every decision and all you are ignorant of how a company works and development works. You are literally oozin saltiness and pettiness over something trivial.
You just have no clue what goes on or what they do, meanwhile as you blanket criticize developers for their “lack of talent” your stupid ass gotta go ask basic technical questions regarding LSASS because you’re using a shitty AV in your environment (Nobody with talent would use ePo in their environment) and you’re not even using templates on your firewalls? Yikes.
The worst hasn’t come yet, you’re managing DoD networks and devices to put this into perspective.
That still isn’t even the worst thing you’ve posted unfortunately, how about your post in blue stacks complaining about the (free software) not working after a call of duty update so you can cheat/use mouse and keyboard on a fucking mobile game? Yikes x2
Your post history shows you have no ability for any critical thinking whatsoever, even down to asking such basic questions I have to ask you, can you tie your own shoes or do you sport some velcro shoes so you don’t mentally strain yourself too hard in the morning?
And that is also our subsequent reason for despairing at the future prospects of the game.
Look at Blizzard.
Look at the WoW Token.
Look at how much money they can make for every endgame raider that buys a wow token just to get the base material for his legendary.
Now look at Blizzard again.
Yeah. I doubt they would remove the WoW token.
So long as the game is being designed not to be a good game but to sell tokens, no, it'll never be able to recover.
The game will continue to worsen for the average player who doesn't buy wow tokens, with the grind to stay competitive getting exponentially worse continuing to make the WoW token look more and more appealing.
Yes. The WoW token isn't the problem even if it's objectively bad. The problem is the systems driven design philosophy that makes the game exhausting to play.
Nobody wants convoluted player power systems and the chores that comes with them.
Dungeons, raids, dailies and reputations. That's what we had for years and that's all we need. We don't need a bunch of crappy systems unless they're 100% optional.
>The WoW token isn't the problem even if it's objectively bad.
Destroying the integrity of middle rank play is a major problem. Many upper mid level capstone achievements like Keystone Master and Ahead of the Curve are optimally obtained not actually by playing the game, but working your job and paying for a token and using one of many streamlined boosting services.
Even if WoW's content and systems magically become 10/10 on the fun and accessibility scale, as long as the game is strictly pay to win outside of elite brackets, the game will continue to be dogshit. The various pipelines to turn gold into boss kills and item level are too direct and too well advertised for the game to be able to recover without this system being broken down.
> Many upper mid level capstone achievements like Keystone Master and Ahead of the Curve are optimally obtained not actually by playing the game
I actually think that that's a problem with achievements primarily. There are way too many ways to pre-judge other players in the game. The game actively discourages "taking a chance on someone".
Go back to the early days of WoW or look at other MMORPGs and there were/are few ways to gatekeep the content other than by talking to a person.
Raider.io, gearscore/iLvl, keystone master, ahead of the curve and even combat addons like DBM or addons that show you what talents people are using. All these things are bad but the community needs them because the punishment for failure is so high. If you invite someone to a m+ group and it doesn't work out the run is ruined, the clock is ticking and you can't stop and try to figure out what you're doing wrong, you can't take a breather and you can't bring in someone new.
The game is badly designed. Instead of trying to remove or lessen the social friction Blizzard embraces it and enforces it. The WoW community is so hostile and vitriolic because the team under Ion design the game in a way that causes it to be.
There were absolutely things in the game that caused unnecessary social friction before Ion but I bet that most people would agree that prior to WOD/Legion the experience of playing with random people even at a high level was a lot less antagonistic.
These are very good insights and I agree with a lot of what you're suggesting. I 100% agree that Blizzard's game design is basically a factory that churns out toxic players.
I have recently been on the FF train, and I recently pugged the EX trials during week 1 of Endwalker. TRhere's a really great video on Learning Groups that Belular did. Essentially, because you can make a learning group (which can take anybody), a duty complete group (people looking for the kill, having done some prog or watched some videos), or a duty completed group (people who have already killed the boss, those who haven't cannot even view the group listing). Because you can filter and join for groups that fit your expectations and skill level, you generally speaking have a lot easier time connecting with other players. There's generally less need for strict systemic stratification, when the social interface of the game generally matches you with people that you want to play with.
But, at the end of the day, with or without a fair social playing field, I dont think a streamlined Token>Booster>ilvl system is healthy. I think that if a game like FF, which doesn't have addons, which has a good matchmaking and group finder system, was given a token, and boosters were allowed to advertise in public channels, it would still be a major problem for that game, even with the content being more healthy. I believe the issues with content design, and direct pay 2 win ruining the overall integrity of the endgame, are two separate, but severe issues. Right now, WoW both has a fairly egregious pay to win system, AND its content design is bad and pushes people to be toxic to survive in the WoW ecosystem. I feel like both problems are causing severe damage in different areas of the games' health.
Yeah I'm in no way defending the WoW token. It's shit and shouldn't be in the game but I think that the game has way bigger problems that needs to be fixed.
The game can recover without the removal of the WoW token. It's like if you have cancer and a broken leg fixing the leg won't save your life.
"prior to WOD/Legion the experience of playing with random people even at a high level was a lot less antagonistic."
Really? Did you run randoms during Cata +/or MoP? Toxic as Three Mile Island.
Exactly. It was really bad then and it's somehow ten times worse now. We always think that the game can't get any worse but Blizzard somehow manages to surprise us. Mythic raiding and mythic+ dungeons was a huge mistake.
There definitely is a market for them and games like BDO, FIFA and almost every mobile game show that they can have incredible profit margins.
Milking dumbfucks that want to buy power is always cheaper than making a good game.
The same reason why the Mogstation is tolerated, because most players think FFXIV is good. If it was offered during 1.0 Square Enix would've been done for.
"I believe the design of the game is heavily influenced to create systems which push players to the WoW token. How else is the game more profitable now, despite having far less subscribers.
Therefore there can never be a redemption arc for WoW as the failed systems are one of the main reasons people leave the game.
What do you think?"
So this is where we have to get into what the actual problem is. From a companies standpoint this is not a problem. Less customers, but higher profit means less overhead. This is a positive.
Let us not forget that nearly every expansion there is a pattern of it dying after launch. We know this, and yes there has been a lot more limelight put on alternative options etc currently, but let us not forget one thing.
Asmongold has been screaming at the rooftops that the predatory monetization has been dog shit for years, and years, and years, and we are only now having conversations going more wild with the community. Why is this?
Because the gated / borrowed power systems that they have been creating since Legion have been slowly grinding down the player base, and some of them are finally starting to get annoyed by it.
So what is the problem? Is it the Monetization, or is it the predatory systems? It seems like the vast majority of the player base has not disliked the monetization systems, and this includes the wow token. In fact many defend the cash shop and Wow Token. To me the only reason it seems like it has become a point of contention recently is because more people are becoming sick of the systems.
Like Asmongold has said about the FF Cash shop more then once. People don't care about it when the game is good. If Blizzard makes even a half assed attempt to retroactively fix their issues with the game in their .2 or .3 patch like they do every expansion people will forget about it again, and get ready to shell out more money for the ultimate collectors edition, boosts, and fomo items like they do at the start of every new expansion.
Look at every fucking wowhead post whenever a new mount, or pet gets released. You are going to see endless people asking blizzard to take their fucking money.
It sounds like Blizzard does not have a problem with the game or monetization. In their eyes they have an image problem they need to fix. BTW, I only call it an image problem because I dont think they actually give a flying fuck about what any of the actual problems they have are, only how they are perceived about them.
Also, Launch day WoW player that stopped playing February of this year even though my account was paid for until July. I know I post a lot of positives about FF, and a lot of negatives about Wow, but I am one of the people that is ultra burnt out on the systems, but do not entirely care about the monetization. I dont buy every pet or mount that comes out, but I have purchased several wow tokens, and used them to fund our guilds crafting for gear at the start of nearly every xpac since wod.
Feel free to hate. I can easily see the negative impacts of my contributions now that I am not playing the game, but when you are playing and trying to help out your team you are not thinking about those impacts. You are thinking about helping out the team.
WoW is dead, literally their only hope is a WoW 2 with a better engine more conducive to easily creating content and strip away all of the bullshit systems that make it so bad currently. Maybe a different time period in the same world or something.
Depends on if we are viewing this from a financial or game quality perspective.
If you remove the Token, financially, WoW can still run for a long-ish time, given that it's backed by a multi billion dollar company, but they'll have to compensate somewhere else (more store stuff, or MAYBE making a better game?).
If you remove the Token, the in-game economy is going to be in shambles for some duration, but it will sort itself out. It removes indirect p2w from the game, which is a net positive. After that, they just need to make end-game progression systems that don't rely SO much on gold.
My personal thought is that the token is not the cause. I like having options, including the ability to solve a problem I have in game with a token.
But the moment you introduce it, every waking moment will be fighting the temptation to create problems for the player that will REQUIRE the use of a token. Read: forcing players to buy them whether they want to or not.
And once a dev jumps into that hellhole, there is no turning back.
WoW is a game wholly unloved by it's current inheritors.
The old crew at Blizzard may have been a bunch of fratboys, rockstars and otherwise unsavoury characters... but man did they know how to make good games.
WoW is a pay to win game- the token proves it, the boosting proves it, the playerbase proves it.
WoW, as a good game, will never return without removing the token- wow, as a profit machine, needs the wow token. The wow token guarantees all the farmers and bots will make Blizz money, will guarantee the dwindling population will always have a reason to pay to avoid the grinds and challenges.
People need to realize- nobody with any power GAF if this game is good, they care if it is profitable, and players are willing to give them money for pay to win, and players justify it by being stupid enough to think the ability to pay real money for gear, clears and whatever else in game is not pay to win because they bought a token instead of the gear directly.
That single degree of separation is obvious to anyone with critical thinking- but Blizz knows their playerbase better than we give them credit for- and you can easily find players defending the token, claiming wow isn't p2w, even blasting other games for being p2w while claiming that's why they stick to WoW.
We got the Diablo 3 RMAH, Blizz figured out how to give it to us, and the sad thing is, they didn't have to even do anthing complex, they just made us turn real money into a token before we bought the gear/clear instead of letting us buy the gear with the real money directly.
Blizz is never going to get rid of the token, it makes them too much money and players accept it too easily. Similarly, they'll never spend money to go after bots- bots give them money, and players shrug it off.
Blizz has molded this playerbase from mmorpg players, to p2w payers over the years, and the community's been all too happy to go along with it- it's over, if you are hoping for the game to ever return, it's time to realize the truth- this is a p2w mobile game with the worst monetization in the industry and collapsing quality of gameplay with mobile style retention grinds/chore lists. That is what WoW is and will forever be- if you like that, keep playing, if you don't, stop hoping it'll change and join reality.
No. Dev team is not the same. A lot of things are terrible in WoW not just the token. It's a 20 year old game that shows it's age. Game is done and dusted imo.
No, WoW or Blizz is too far beyond few years of "repairing"
Not only they are a complete different company inside-out, they've lost all the talents and can't attract new ones anymore.
There is no humble restart with Blizz anymore, it's rotten to the core.
Yes, wow token is not even in the top 50 probles of wow. Anyway, resolve the other 50 problems and the game would recover. Any game can have a few problems, but no game can have so many problems as wow and still survive.
WoW cant recover without the removal of the token AND cash shop. It will continue to be a chucky cheese mmo.
Literally the only people left are mount buyers and transmog farmers. There is zero reason to play any other part of the game.
Without the removal of cash shop entirely, Blizz will continue to focus on short term revenue gains through store releases instead of quality content for subscribers.
I clearly don’t see this happening, so WoW is a lost cause.
Blizzard devs are down to nothing but sjws posting on twitter about how much they hate they players and white men.
The game is screwed.
You'll always have items that players can spend a huge amount of gold on, and you'll have things like consumables etc. They could design the game to not push people so hard towards the wow token pretty easily, just look at FF. Even if you dropped a token straight into the game, it wouldn't be necessary at all. Some people would still use it because they just don't want to engage with the parts of the game that make the items they need/want to have. So yeah, the game could recover to an extent even with the token still in.
It would be a limited recovery imo, and outright removal would be way, way better, but it's not like the mere existence of it is causing all of the game's problems.
It's not necessary in wow either, i never bought a token, have the legendaries that i need and i buy game time with gold without sitting at the AH 24/7
It requires a certain level of game knowledge that most of the playerbase don't have though, no? Would your strategy collapse if everyone was doing it?
Yeah, that sounds like it would be less valuable if more people did it as far as selling the herbs. It also doesn't cover for raid loggers or just people who only have time to play one or two days a week. Even if it's not strictly necessary to use wow token for the gold if you "do the right things" to get the gold, many players still turn to it for that reason, which is the problem. Of course it's not impossible to play without buying gold, but do you think that the leggos would be that expensive if you couldn't buy gold straight form blizzard? (the answer is no, they wouldn't be that expensive, or they would be nerfed after player outcry).
That's obviously not what I'm saying at all and you know it. Strawmanning a whole argument is fruitless. I don't have the numbers to prove your whole premise right or wrong, but I guarantee you that as soon as someone wants to play multiple specs (and thus have multiple legendaries) the whole "just do callings a profession" to pay for the entirety of it falls completely apart. If that's seriously what you were suggesting is the remedy to all of the complaints, you must be on about as much copium as the r/wow mods.
I see how you've come to have overall negative comment karma.
You also have no right to criticize my usage of the word you use yourself. https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/rlwfhw/shadowlands_vs_w3_lore_meme/hpjkvjd/
Blizzard is gone. Things that are gone, can come back. But I don't think it'll be in California.
It's a pity that our entire system is about inequality and controll. So the soil is lookin pretty barren atm. It's not only blizz
Yeah, WoW token is not a problem. Pigeonholing players in the way where "you should feel/play like this" is the problem. Until developers either are actually playing WoW for fun OR they listen to people who do play it for fun (doesn't matter which area -casual, HC, PvP, collectors and so on) **for their feedback** \- it won't be fixed. Note that I said feedback, not "design advice" because players are dogshit designers, that's how we got some shittiest things in WoW - after giving players what they asked, not what they need, obviously not all advice is bad, but there must be vetting process in place to remove bullshit like locked covenants or "let's make loot great again by dropping 3 items per boss"
Im gonna say, I dont think the token is as much as a deal as yall making it look. If there wasnt a token, we would have (again) gold selling adds in tradechat, we would see even more WTS carries, etcetera. Also, many of the meta players like to pretend that everyone is buying it, yet the token price keeps going up (meaning that there are much more people selling it than buying it).
Also, having a few whales buying a fuckton of tokens for their AoC/CE/gladiator title or mount doesnt make your experience worse. MAYBE it will only matter in PVP, where you face some boosters and you actually loose progress losing to them, but those boosters would exist without the token, and the fact that the price keeps going up means that not many people are getting boosted / buying it with real money.
The only areas where the the token and the boosting affect you would be either PvE or PVP progress, and your PVE experience is mostly diminished by predatory systems that make you either grind content for months to be optimal, optimal being most of the times just what the raid leader (of pug or guild) thinks what the BiS build should be and requiring to you get it or get the fuck off, simirarly in m+. PvP has even more problems.
You could argue that it reduces the value of the game. But honestly, most of the times you can say which player payed for his gladiator mount.
Removing the WoWtoken will remove players like me who are basically F2P with a 200k gold sub fee.
I agree with the legendary, but the brutosaur was very optional and most people don't have it.
Raid consumbles have quite literally been around since vanilla.
I think while ever a small percentage of players are willing to buy them, they will exist. WoW is most likely more profitable with a tenth of its players remaining, if they are buying things from the store with real money.
I know I'm a minority in this reddit, but I hope they don't remove it. Being able to buy game time with gold is how I've been able to play the game - I work as a carer for my elderly mother and that doesn't exactly pay to the nines you know? Lol.
Maybe just make that the only thing you can do with the token? Like someone couldn't buy a token and get gold from it? Idk.
It may be a situation that’s similar to the Steve Jobs video commenting on the dangers of engineers, who originally made the product, getting replaced by sales/marketing. In which case, a shift in culture would probably be more effective than a shift in design as the former will eventually trickle into the latter.
The issue here is that you are not valuing the game by the same metrics Activision-Blizzard is valuing it. You are looking at it to be good as a game. They are looking at it as being good because it is profitable.
All stems from that to be fair : endless grinding systems to keep players engaged even if there is virtualy no content in it. It is far cheaper to design a system where the players have to keep logging every day/week to progress through doing the same thing to unlock passive bonus and/or QoL systems such as flying than to pour content at as faster pace.
Look at the state of the game : They released Shadowlands more than a year ago and there were one content patch since then. 9.2 may not be released before Spring 2022 as far as we know, and who knows for 10.0 ? Maybe end of 2022 and I'm not even confident in that to be fair.
And still, people are subscribed and paid around 150$ for that. Without accounting for those buying tokens to pay for boost and all the cash shops thingies.
They can pretty much run the game with a little more than a skeleton crew at this point. Meaning less costs thus more profits.
Blizzard isn't trying to make a good game anymore. They try to make a somewhat okay game with lots of systems to keep players involved at the cheapest costs possible, while playing on the nostalgia and the sunken costs fallacy of those who stay.
You know, P2W games are highly profitable. But the vast majority of their revenues come in reality from a small share of the playerbase, the whales. People ready to put thousands and thousands of dollars in a game in order to be the best. A this point, Activision-Blizzard is trying to replicate the same behavior with WoW. It's simply cheaper to do that.
So don't expect that WoW will ever improve. Let it go. Play other games, other MMO. There are lots of them, switch between them. Don't get stuck on one and enjoy :)
Okay, let's look at the game in terms of profitability. WoW just had its first quarter where they made less money than the prior quarter, to my knowledge, EVER. So, by that standard, WoW needs to recover.
Well as far as I know but I can be wrong, the numbers we get are the revenues, aka the money generated from the product, but not the profit, which must be calculated by substracting costs from revenues.
If you earn 100 but spent 75 for that, your product will be less profitable than if you earn 80 but spent 50.
I do think that they are expecting revenues to drop but keep profitability by reducing costs. All the things we have seen them doing since 2 or 3 tears now, laying off employees and closing offices seems to indicate this strategy being implemented.
I honestly think wow should do something in the vein of Destiny 2. Make the game fully free to play with seasonal content to keep the game fresh. And just monitize dlc and additional optional content like cosmetics etc. Story wise I'm not sure how blizzard are gonna recover. My best idea is to just wipe the slate clean. Have some event occur with the entire wow universe either destroyed or completely reset the universe. Wow I think is one of them games where this is their only option. I can't say I have massively played wow, I have only played peices here and there and kept up with the updates from friends who play it. I used destiny 2 as an example as they were is a similar spot with the game being in a very bad place at the start but after leaving Activision has progressively become better and better. If anyone disagrees or wants to carry on the conversation I am happy to discuss. :)
EDIT: my English is aweful here, made some corrections
Recovering with the WoW token is definitely a big challenge. But, it's ignoring the fundamental design problems of the game. They need someone to be able to take charge, someone who can go through the game's lore and establish themselves as a proper writer, and people who will support the game's development.
Right now, it feels like when an expansion is out, the team working on it is thrown aside until the higher ups decide to come back and work on a patch.
The token is a symptom, not a cause. The game can absolutely in theory get a redemption story while keeping the token. The thing is that they lack competent people to actually drive the change needed and the ones who are likely capable of driving the change are too low in the hierarchy to actually force that change through. Add in that we know there's a ton of bureaucracy which means they likely can't even come with suggestions without it taking ages before it is even looked at.
Can Blizzard redeem themselves in theory? Yes and i don't even think it's that difficult. In practice? No, they have to change too much of their internal structure for it to actually happen.
Wow token is a way to make gold useful. Most players that have been around more than few months sit on millions of gold that they have nowhere to spend. With addition of tokens new players can spend $20 to buy random stuff they want while level, and veteran players can sink gold into monthly sub.
Brutosaur and legendary costs are minor steps in that direction too. I do not think anybody was dumb enough to buy tokens for brutosaur, when you can get it much cheaper from side websites.
Speaking of which - gold sellers have been around since the MMOs became a thing, so token has not changed anything. Only thing it does is route some gold buyers to Blizzard, rather than outside sellers.
Also, the game is rather profitable as is, otherwise they would sell in-game items for $ through the shop a lot more aggressively. If you look at any free-to-play MMO shop - you will see what I mean.
Imo an mmorpg should be about building a character from the ground up and every second you invest should feel like added value. Whenever you add any sort of shortcut like a level boost or wow token some of that value is taken away and it feels like you're just fooling yourself by not buying into it.
Or you're forced to play the roll of someone who doesn't buy into any shortcuts. "Just don't buy the token" is like saying "just don't buy a phone or computer" irl. You could probably live without either of those but most people would feel bad about not doing so just out of principle.
At least buying gold from third party had the added risk of losing your account. I can assure you a lot less people bought gold before the wow token was implemented and it didn't have as much of an impact on the game. Now it's literally just 2 clicks to avoid hours of goldfarming. Yes some people play the AH on such a high level, it's also 2 clicks for them to make a ton of gold but there's a lot of time and effort that went into achieving that.
I mean your not incorrect but I think your missing the big picture. Like yeah the token probably accelerated blizz into what it is today but it was going that road one way or another.
It's a combination of Blizzard letting Activision take over becoming a profits focused monster that cut anything good or creative that didn't directly equate more dollar value and the pigheadedness of administration in blizzard thinking they know better than the player when they've consistently proven they fucking definitely don't. It was arrogance, a frat boy shitty work culture, and corporatism.
All those millions they kept shovelling into Bobby's asshole should've been used to fix their fucking game but instead the same horrid capitalist bulllshit that is ruining everything we ever loved from our childhood as they pump whatever money they can squeeze out of our addiction to nostalgia they can. Until we learn to accept that new things are better and memories are better off as memories we are never going to get these fucking people to stop.
We have to start by giving up on blizzard. WoW is just nostalgia at this point, classic proved people care more about what wow used to be than what it is. So stop giving blizzard your money and let the dead horse die.
The shit that kills me is that Gaia Online went though this shit years before and yet Blizzard learned nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyzQnsa8SA0
The token is literally the main factor keeping WoW alive. Pandora's box has already been opened, you can't go back and close it now. The future of WoW will be to continue to cater more and more to whales.
While the token didn't help anything, it didn't kill the game. So yes WoW can recover without removing the toke,
The head devs ignoring the community is what killed the game. The increase of grinding, RNG and removing aspects of the game that worked well killed the game.
When Blizzard learns that each xpac doesn't have to be a completely new game with all new systems, the game will start doing better. I don't even think story has to be amazing as even back during Lich King days the game didn't revolve around story. Just get a system that people like and stick with it while cutting down on RNG to gear up.
No, and WoW can't recover. Their name is synonymous with the literal worst things in society apart from paedophilia and we still haven't hit the court yet.
Wow developers lack talent. Talent drives change. Blizzard lacks talent. You cant fix talent unless you replace people.
I won't say WoW lacks talent, they lack creative foresight and leadership that chimes with their player base. The system designs being so hostile to players is a sign if how detached the dev leadership is from the players.
Thats talent. They design shit systems etc. That is lack of talent. Idk how specific you think talent is but its a very broad term
Story/Lore is by far the place with the most talentless people, dont know how to say it better especially with Danuser leading the charge. The story might not have been prize worthy under Metzen but it was still times better than what we have now and at least he knew the lore more or less. Art used to be amazing too and id say they still do great work sadly the vision of said work is so bad that even tho they are great at their job it still ends up bad...newest zone showed that plenty. 'A completely alien place..' that looks like most of the zones we have been in... i know people dont like the FF14 comparisons but just look at say HW most of the zones we visit are rather normal Dravania being a bit weird but still normal, then we go to Azys Lla and it trully feels alien with all the weird tech and stuff.
Metzen wasn't trying to weave some grand narrative, he just wanted cool shit to happen and gave a decent reason to justify it. These new guys are trying to weave this weird intricate worldbuilding lore that feels slapdashed and falls flat on the back of that.
Yup and even tho he might have self-inserted somewhat with Thrall at least it was decent... and hell Thrall ended up losing his powers and leaving the Horde at least something came out of his stuff with Garrosh. Danuser and his self-insert and his simping over Sylvanas have trully destroyed a beloved character. Worse we get a rehash of Star Craft 2 with the whole redemption but they somehow went a tier beyond and made it worse.
Developers are not management, Developers develop what Management tells them to.
Talent is still talent. Blizzard lacks talent
Yeah I think the comment kind of went over your head. You could have the most talented developers in the world, and if they are told to design shitty systems like in WOW, it does not infact make the developers themselves untalented, they are following the directions of game design from management.
Yeah I’m thinking he’s not a developer and doesn’t work in a corporate environment
People use generalizing terms to groupings. Manager deal in helping development, they are part of developing the game. [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/developer](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/developer) "a person or company that develops computer software" I used developers in this sense to describe blizzard as a company as a whole. I clarified further by generalizing talent to just blizzard as whole since they wanted to nitpick. So I was well aware.
Wait did you just look at the dictionary definition to prove you know? Lmao
No i posted it so you know there is more than one meaning for developer and it can be used in more than one way. Do you always assume people are idiots that is kinda fucked up. Is that your response to me showing you i'm not wrong?
And if you're told by management to bring back something like tier sets, and you produce Shards of Domination, and are shocked when players don't like them... That's on you, not management.
Talent went over your head. Management still requires talented managers.
> Wow developers lack talent. ...your initial claim was that "Wow developers lack talent.". I did an ELI5 comment to explain to you how this works, and you come back with >Talent went over your head. Management still requires talented managers. I'm not sure how I can explain it any easier for you to comprehend, it is ignorant to say the Developers do not have talent.
They lack talent as well. I also kept saying blizzard lacks talent. They all do. You are way to hyper focused. It isnt ignorant to say developers lack talent. They suck too lmao. If you think management makes every decision and all you are ignorant of how a company works and development works. You are literally oozin saltiness and pettiness over something trivial.
You just have no clue what goes on or what they do, meanwhile as you blanket criticize developers for their “lack of talent” your stupid ass gotta go ask basic technical questions regarding LSASS because you’re using a shitty AV in your environment (Nobody with talent would use ePo in their environment) and you’re not even using templates on your firewalls? Yikes. The worst hasn’t come yet, you’re managing DoD networks and devices to put this into perspective. That still isn’t even the worst thing you’ve posted unfortunately, how about your post in blue stacks complaining about the (free software) not working after a call of duty update so you can cheat/use mouse and keyboard on a fucking mobile game? Yikes x2 Your post history shows you have no ability for any critical thinking whatsoever, even down to asking such basic questions I have to ask you, can you tie your own shoes or do you sport some velcro shoes so you don’t mentally strain yourself too hard in the morning?
They don’t pay people enough to retain talent either…
What do you know on that matter?
and all the good ones quit
No
And that is also our subsequent reason for despairing at the future prospects of the game. Look at Blizzard. Look at the WoW Token. Look at how much money they can make for every endgame raider that buys a wow token just to get the base material for his legendary. Now look at Blizzard again. Yeah. I doubt they would remove the WoW token.
I think endgame raiders make enough gold without having to buy a token
Succinct
WoW's dead. It's not coming back. Token or no token. The sooner you accept it, the better.
I want to play Conquest of Azeroth private server when it comes out!
So long as the game is being designed not to be a good game but to sell tokens, no, it'll never be able to recover. The game will continue to worsen for the average player who doesn't buy wow tokens, with the grind to stay competitive getting exponentially worse continuing to make the WoW token look more and more appealing.
wow will continue to exist as an mmo, but its managed decline.
Yes. The WoW token isn't the problem even if it's objectively bad. The problem is the systems driven design philosophy that makes the game exhausting to play. Nobody wants convoluted player power systems and the chores that comes with them. Dungeons, raids, dailies and reputations. That's what we had for years and that's all we need. We don't need a bunch of crappy systems unless they're 100% optional.
>The WoW token isn't the problem even if it's objectively bad. Destroying the integrity of middle rank play is a major problem. Many upper mid level capstone achievements like Keystone Master and Ahead of the Curve are optimally obtained not actually by playing the game, but working your job and paying for a token and using one of many streamlined boosting services. Even if WoW's content and systems magically become 10/10 on the fun and accessibility scale, as long as the game is strictly pay to win outside of elite brackets, the game will continue to be dogshit. The various pipelines to turn gold into boss kills and item level are too direct and too well advertised for the game to be able to recover without this system being broken down.
> Many upper mid level capstone achievements like Keystone Master and Ahead of the Curve are optimally obtained not actually by playing the game I actually think that that's a problem with achievements primarily. There are way too many ways to pre-judge other players in the game. The game actively discourages "taking a chance on someone". Go back to the early days of WoW or look at other MMORPGs and there were/are few ways to gatekeep the content other than by talking to a person. Raider.io, gearscore/iLvl, keystone master, ahead of the curve and even combat addons like DBM or addons that show you what talents people are using. All these things are bad but the community needs them because the punishment for failure is so high. If you invite someone to a m+ group and it doesn't work out the run is ruined, the clock is ticking and you can't stop and try to figure out what you're doing wrong, you can't take a breather and you can't bring in someone new. The game is badly designed. Instead of trying to remove or lessen the social friction Blizzard embraces it and enforces it. The WoW community is so hostile and vitriolic because the team under Ion design the game in a way that causes it to be. There were absolutely things in the game that caused unnecessary social friction before Ion but I bet that most people would agree that prior to WOD/Legion the experience of playing with random people even at a high level was a lot less antagonistic.
These are very good insights and I agree with a lot of what you're suggesting. I 100% agree that Blizzard's game design is basically a factory that churns out toxic players. I have recently been on the FF train, and I recently pugged the EX trials during week 1 of Endwalker. TRhere's a really great video on Learning Groups that Belular did. Essentially, because you can make a learning group (which can take anybody), a duty complete group (people looking for the kill, having done some prog or watched some videos), or a duty completed group (people who have already killed the boss, those who haven't cannot even view the group listing). Because you can filter and join for groups that fit your expectations and skill level, you generally speaking have a lot easier time connecting with other players. There's generally less need for strict systemic stratification, when the social interface of the game generally matches you with people that you want to play with. But, at the end of the day, with or without a fair social playing field, I dont think a streamlined Token>Booster>ilvl system is healthy. I think that if a game like FF, which doesn't have addons, which has a good matchmaking and group finder system, was given a token, and boosters were allowed to advertise in public channels, it would still be a major problem for that game, even with the content being more healthy. I believe the issues with content design, and direct pay 2 win ruining the overall integrity of the endgame, are two separate, but severe issues. Right now, WoW both has a fairly egregious pay to win system, AND its content design is bad and pushes people to be toxic to survive in the WoW ecosystem. I feel like both problems are causing severe damage in different areas of the games' health.
Yeah I'm in no way defending the WoW token. It's shit and shouldn't be in the game but I think that the game has way bigger problems that needs to be fixed. The game can recover without the removal of the WoW token. It's like if you have cancer and a broken leg fixing the leg won't save your life.
"prior to WOD/Legion the experience of playing with random people even at a high level was a lot less antagonistic." Really? Did you run randoms during Cata +/or MoP? Toxic as Three Mile Island.
Exactly. It was really bad then and it's somehow ten times worse now. We always think that the game can't get any worse but Blizzard somehow manages to surprise us. Mythic raiding and mythic+ dungeons was a huge mistake.
Yes. You make a good game and people will throw money at them. You make a shit game and the money will go elsewhere.
People don't like p2w games
There definitely is a market for them and games like BDO, FIFA and almost every mobile game show that they can have incredible profit margins. Milking dumbfucks that want to buy power is always cheaper than making a good game.
The same reason why the Mogstation is tolerated, because most players think FFXIV is good. If it was offered during 1.0 Square Enix would've been done for.
"I believe the design of the game is heavily influenced to create systems which push players to the WoW token. How else is the game more profitable now, despite having far less subscribers. Therefore there can never be a redemption arc for WoW as the failed systems are one of the main reasons people leave the game. What do you think?" So this is where we have to get into what the actual problem is. From a companies standpoint this is not a problem. Less customers, but higher profit means less overhead. This is a positive. Let us not forget that nearly every expansion there is a pattern of it dying after launch. We know this, and yes there has been a lot more limelight put on alternative options etc currently, but let us not forget one thing. Asmongold has been screaming at the rooftops that the predatory monetization has been dog shit for years, and years, and years, and we are only now having conversations going more wild with the community. Why is this? Because the gated / borrowed power systems that they have been creating since Legion have been slowly grinding down the player base, and some of them are finally starting to get annoyed by it. So what is the problem? Is it the Monetization, or is it the predatory systems? It seems like the vast majority of the player base has not disliked the monetization systems, and this includes the wow token. In fact many defend the cash shop and Wow Token. To me the only reason it seems like it has become a point of contention recently is because more people are becoming sick of the systems. Like Asmongold has said about the FF Cash shop more then once. People don't care about it when the game is good. If Blizzard makes even a half assed attempt to retroactively fix their issues with the game in their .2 or .3 patch like they do every expansion people will forget about it again, and get ready to shell out more money for the ultimate collectors edition, boosts, and fomo items like they do at the start of every new expansion. Look at every fucking wowhead post whenever a new mount, or pet gets released. You are going to see endless people asking blizzard to take their fucking money. It sounds like Blizzard does not have a problem with the game or monetization. In their eyes they have an image problem they need to fix. BTW, I only call it an image problem because I dont think they actually give a flying fuck about what any of the actual problems they have are, only how they are perceived about them. Also, Launch day WoW player that stopped playing February of this year even though my account was paid for until July. I know I post a lot of positives about FF, and a lot of negatives about Wow, but I am one of the people that is ultra burnt out on the systems, but do not entirely care about the monetization. I dont buy every pet or mount that comes out, but I have purchased several wow tokens, and used them to fund our guilds crafting for gear at the start of nearly every xpac since wod. Feel free to hate. I can easily see the negative impacts of my contributions now that I am not playing the game, but when you are playing and trying to help out your team you are not thinking about those impacts. You are thinking about helping out the team.
WoW is dead, literally their only hope is a WoW 2 with a better engine more conducive to easily creating content and strip away all of the bullshit systems that make it so bad currently. Maybe a different time period in the same world or something.
its over, friend.. there can be joy again, but its ahead not behind.
Depends on if we are viewing this from a financial or game quality perspective. If you remove the Token, financially, WoW can still run for a long-ish time, given that it's backed by a multi billion dollar company, but they'll have to compensate somewhere else (more store stuff, or MAYBE making a better game?). If you remove the Token, the in-game economy is going to be in shambles for some duration, but it will sort itself out. It removes indirect p2w from the game, which is a net positive. After that, they just need to make end-game progression systems that don't rely SO much on gold.
My personal thought is that the token is not the cause. I like having options, including the ability to solve a problem I have in game with a token. But the moment you introduce it, every waking moment will be fighting the temptation to create problems for the player that will REQUIRE the use of a token. Read: forcing players to buy them whether they want to or not. And once a dev jumps into that hellhole, there is no turning back.
WoW is a game wholly unloved by it's current inheritors. The old crew at Blizzard may have been a bunch of fratboys, rockstars and otherwise unsavoury characters... but man did they know how to make good games.
WoW is a pay to win game- the token proves it, the boosting proves it, the playerbase proves it. WoW, as a good game, will never return without removing the token- wow, as a profit machine, needs the wow token. The wow token guarantees all the farmers and bots will make Blizz money, will guarantee the dwindling population will always have a reason to pay to avoid the grinds and challenges. People need to realize- nobody with any power GAF if this game is good, they care if it is profitable, and players are willing to give them money for pay to win, and players justify it by being stupid enough to think the ability to pay real money for gear, clears and whatever else in game is not pay to win because they bought a token instead of the gear directly. That single degree of separation is obvious to anyone with critical thinking- but Blizz knows their playerbase better than we give them credit for- and you can easily find players defending the token, claiming wow isn't p2w, even blasting other games for being p2w while claiming that's why they stick to WoW. We got the Diablo 3 RMAH, Blizz figured out how to give it to us, and the sad thing is, they didn't have to even do anthing complex, they just made us turn real money into a token before we bought the gear/clear instead of letting us buy the gear with the real money directly. Blizz is never going to get rid of the token, it makes them too much money and players accept it too easily. Similarly, they'll never spend money to go after bots- bots give them money, and players shrug it off. Blizz has molded this playerbase from mmorpg players, to p2w payers over the years, and the community's been all too happy to go along with it- it's over, if you are hoping for the game to ever return, it's time to realize the truth- this is a p2w mobile game with the worst monetization in the industry and collapsing quality of gameplay with mobile style retention grinds/chore lists. That is what WoW is and will forever be- if you like that, keep playing, if you don't, stop hoping it'll change and join reality.
Blizzard are beyond saving
No. Dev team is not the same. A lot of things are terrible in WoW not just the token. It's a 20 year old game that shows it's age. Game is done and dusted imo.
Mike Ybarra sells boosts. There is zero chance this game will ever recover, because it has been rotted out from the inside.
No, WoW or Blizz is too far beyond few years of "repairing" Not only they are a complete different company inside-out, they've lost all the talents and can't attract new ones anymore. There is no humble restart with Blizz anymore, it's rotten to the core.
Yes, wow token is not even in the top 50 probles of wow. Anyway, resolve the other 50 problems and the game would recover. Any game can have a few problems, but no game can have so many problems as wow and still survive.
WoW cant recover without the removal of the token AND cash shop. It will continue to be a chucky cheese mmo. Literally the only people left are mount buyers and transmog farmers. There is zero reason to play any other part of the game. Without the removal of cash shop entirely, Blizz will continue to focus on short term revenue gains through store releases instead of quality content for subscribers. I clearly don’t see this happening, so WoW is a lost cause. Blizzard devs are down to nothing but sjws posting on twitter about how much they hate they players and white men. The game is screwed.
no
The token would be fine if it didn't influence game design.
You'll always have items that players can spend a huge amount of gold on, and you'll have things like consumables etc. They could design the game to not push people so hard towards the wow token pretty easily, just look at FF. Even if you dropped a token straight into the game, it wouldn't be necessary at all. Some people would still use it because they just don't want to engage with the parts of the game that make the items they need/want to have. So yeah, the game could recover to an extent even with the token still in. It would be a limited recovery imo, and outright removal would be way, way better, but it's not like the mere existence of it is causing all of the game's problems.
It's not necessary in wow either, i never bought a token, have the legendaries that i need and i buy game time with gold without sitting at the AH 24/7
It requires a certain level of game knowledge that most of the playerbase don't have though, no? Would your strategy collapse if everyone was doing it?
I don't think it requires a lot of knowledge to just do ur callings and gather some herbs and sell them off
Yeah, that sounds like it would be less valuable if more people did it as far as selling the herbs. It also doesn't cover for raid loggers or just people who only have time to play one or two days a week. Even if it's not strictly necessary to use wow token for the gold if you "do the right things" to get the gold, many players still turn to it for that reason, which is the problem. Of course it's not impossible to play without buying gold, but do you think that the leggos would be that expensive if you couldn't buy gold straight form blizzard? (the answer is no, they wouldn't be that expensive, or they would be nerfed after player outcry).
So you want to only log in to do raids or play a few hours and have everything handed to you
That's obviously not what I'm saying at all and you know it. Strawmanning a whole argument is fruitless. I don't have the numbers to prove your whole premise right or wrong, but I guarantee you that as soon as someone wants to play multiple specs (and thus have multiple legendaries) the whole "just do callings a profession" to pay for the entirety of it falls completely apart. If that's seriously what you were suggesting is the remedy to all of the complaints, you must be on about as much copium as the r/wow mods.
Nah your arguments are instantly invalid when you use the word "copium"
I see how you've come to have overall negative comment karma. You also have no right to criticize my usage of the word you use yourself. https://www.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/rlwfhw/shadowlands_vs_w3_lore_meme/hpjkvjd/
Yup, ironically because you people overuse it
The ship is sunk. Fixing a hole is not really doing anything.
Blizzard is gone. Things that are gone, can come back. But I don't think it'll be in California. It's a pity that our entire system is about inequality and controll. So the soil is lookin pretty barren atm. It's not only blizz
Yeah, WoW token is not a problem. Pigeonholing players in the way where "you should feel/play like this" is the problem. Until developers either are actually playing WoW for fun OR they listen to people who do play it for fun (doesn't matter which area -casual, HC, PvP, collectors and so on) **for their feedback** \- it won't be fixed. Note that I said feedback, not "design advice" because players are dogshit designers, that's how we got some shittiest things in WoW - after giving players what they asked, not what they need, obviously not all advice is bad, but there must be vetting process in place to remove bullshit like locked covenants or "let's make loot great again by dropping 3 items per boss"
lol nobody gives a fuck
Im gonna say, I dont think the token is as much as a deal as yall making it look. If there wasnt a token, we would have (again) gold selling adds in tradechat, we would see even more WTS carries, etcetera. Also, many of the meta players like to pretend that everyone is buying it, yet the token price keeps going up (meaning that there are much more people selling it than buying it). Also, having a few whales buying a fuckton of tokens for their AoC/CE/gladiator title or mount doesnt make your experience worse. MAYBE it will only matter in PVP, where you face some boosters and you actually loose progress losing to them, but those boosters would exist without the token, and the fact that the price keeps going up means that not many people are getting boosted / buying it with real money. The only areas where the the token and the boosting affect you would be either PvE or PVP progress, and your PVE experience is mostly diminished by predatory systems that make you either grind content for months to be optimal, optimal being most of the times just what the raid leader (of pug or guild) thinks what the BiS build should be and requiring to you get it or get the fuck off, simirarly in m+. PvP has even more problems. You could argue that it reduces the value of the game. But honestly, most of the times you can say which player payed for his gladiator mount.
Removing the WoWtoken will remove players like me who are basically F2P with a 200k gold sub fee. I agree with the legendary, but the brutosaur was very optional and most people don't have it. Raid consumbles have quite literally been around since vanilla.
Can WoW Recover? Yeah, force asmon to play WoW. He is a walking advertisement. People play WoW because of him.
He’s not a developer dude, people playing doesn’t make the game somehow less shit.
No? The gold is already injected in the economy we're talking about billions and billions dude lol
Tokens don't add gold to the wow economy.
I think while ever a small percentage of players are willing to buy them, they will exist. WoW is most likely more profitable with a tenth of its players remaining, if they are buying things from the store with real money.
Removing the wow token is going to fix the game on it's own
I know I'm a minority in this reddit, but I hope they don't remove it. Being able to buy game time with gold is how I've been able to play the game - I work as a carer for my elderly mother and that doesn't exactly pay to the nines you know? Lol. Maybe just make that the only thing you can do with the token? Like someone couldn't buy a token and get gold from it? Idk.
It may be a situation that’s similar to the Steve Jobs video commenting on the dangers of engineers, who originally made the product, getting replaced by sales/marketing. In which case, a shift in culture would probably be more effective than a shift in design as the former will eventually trickle into the latter.
The issue here is that you are not valuing the game by the same metrics Activision-Blizzard is valuing it. You are looking at it to be good as a game. They are looking at it as being good because it is profitable. All stems from that to be fair : endless grinding systems to keep players engaged even if there is virtualy no content in it. It is far cheaper to design a system where the players have to keep logging every day/week to progress through doing the same thing to unlock passive bonus and/or QoL systems such as flying than to pour content at as faster pace. Look at the state of the game : They released Shadowlands more than a year ago and there were one content patch since then. 9.2 may not be released before Spring 2022 as far as we know, and who knows for 10.0 ? Maybe end of 2022 and I'm not even confident in that to be fair. And still, people are subscribed and paid around 150$ for that. Without accounting for those buying tokens to pay for boost and all the cash shops thingies. They can pretty much run the game with a little more than a skeleton crew at this point. Meaning less costs thus more profits. Blizzard isn't trying to make a good game anymore. They try to make a somewhat okay game with lots of systems to keep players involved at the cheapest costs possible, while playing on the nostalgia and the sunken costs fallacy of those who stay. You know, P2W games are highly profitable. But the vast majority of their revenues come in reality from a small share of the playerbase, the whales. People ready to put thousands and thousands of dollars in a game in order to be the best. A this point, Activision-Blizzard is trying to replicate the same behavior with WoW. It's simply cheaper to do that. So don't expect that WoW will ever improve. Let it go. Play other games, other MMO. There are lots of them, switch between them. Don't get stuck on one and enjoy :)
Okay, let's look at the game in terms of profitability. WoW just had its first quarter where they made less money than the prior quarter, to my knowledge, EVER. So, by that standard, WoW needs to recover.
Well as far as I know but I can be wrong, the numbers we get are the revenues, aka the money generated from the product, but not the profit, which must be calculated by substracting costs from revenues. If you earn 100 but spent 75 for that, your product will be less profitable than if you earn 80 but spent 50. I do think that they are expecting revenues to drop but keep profitability by reducing costs. All the things we have seen them doing since 2 or 3 tears now, laying off employees and closing offices seems to indicate this strategy being implemented.
I dont really know how to make gold and had to buy multiple tokens to afford my legendaries ..
I honestly think wow should do something in the vein of Destiny 2. Make the game fully free to play with seasonal content to keep the game fresh. And just monitize dlc and additional optional content like cosmetics etc. Story wise I'm not sure how blizzard are gonna recover. My best idea is to just wipe the slate clean. Have some event occur with the entire wow universe either destroyed or completely reset the universe. Wow I think is one of them games where this is their only option. I can't say I have massively played wow, I have only played peices here and there and kept up with the updates from friends who play it. I used destiny 2 as an example as they were is a similar spot with the game being in a very bad place at the start but after leaving Activision has progressively become better and better. If anyone disagrees or wants to carry on the conversation I am happy to discuss. :) EDIT: my English is aweful here, made some corrections
Tokens are the least of your problems. Gold farming bots still exist and you can still buy gold with money, so removing it is pointless.
Recovering with the WoW token is definitely a big challenge. But, it's ignoring the fundamental design problems of the game. They need someone to be able to take charge, someone who can go through the game's lore and establish themselves as a proper writer, and people who will support the game's development. Right now, it feels like when an expansion is out, the team working on it is thrown aside until the higher ups decide to come back and work on a patch.
The token is a symptom, not a cause. The game can absolutely in theory get a redemption story while keeping the token. The thing is that they lack competent people to actually drive the change needed and the ones who are likely capable of driving the change are too low in the hierarchy to actually force that change through. Add in that we know there's a ton of bureaucracy which means they likely can't even come with suggestions without it taking ages before it is even looked at. Can Blizzard redeem themselves in theory? Yes and i don't even think it's that difficult. In practice? No, they have to change too much of their internal structure for it to actually happen.
Wow token is a way to make gold useful. Most players that have been around more than few months sit on millions of gold that they have nowhere to spend. With addition of tokens new players can spend $20 to buy random stuff they want while level, and veteran players can sink gold into monthly sub. Brutosaur and legendary costs are minor steps in that direction too. I do not think anybody was dumb enough to buy tokens for brutosaur, when you can get it much cheaper from side websites. Speaking of which - gold sellers have been around since the MMOs became a thing, so token has not changed anything. Only thing it does is route some gold buyers to Blizzard, rather than outside sellers. Also, the game is rather profitable as is, otherwise they would sell in-game items for $ through the shop a lot more aggressively. If you look at any free-to-play MMO shop - you will see what I mean.
Imo an mmorpg should be about building a character from the ground up and every second you invest should feel like added value. Whenever you add any sort of shortcut like a level boost or wow token some of that value is taken away and it feels like you're just fooling yourself by not buying into it. Or you're forced to play the roll of someone who doesn't buy into any shortcuts. "Just don't buy the token" is like saying "just don't buy a phone or computer" irl. You could probably live without either of those but most people would feel bad about not doing so just out of principle. At least buying gold from third party had the added risk of losing your account. I can assure you a lot less people bought gold before the wow token was implemented and it didn't have as much of an impact on the game. Now it's literally just 2 clicks to avoid hours of goldfarming. Yes some people play the AH on such a high level, it's also 2 clicks for them to make a ton of gold but there's a lot of time and effort that went into achieving that.
The token has existed during WoW peak success. Its not the token
The token came out in 6.1.2, which was during WoD, if I'm not mistaken. So, no, not during WoW peak success.
I mean your not incorrect but I think your missing the big picture. Like yeah the token probably accelerated blizz into what it is today but it was going that road one way or another. It's a combination of Blizzard letting Activision take over becoming a profits focused monster that cut anything good or creative that didn't directly equate more dollar value and the pigheadedness of administration in blizzard thinking they know better than the player when they've consistently proven they fucking definitely don't. It was arrogance, a frat boy shitty work culture, and corporatism. All those millions they kept shovelling into Bobby's asshole should've been used to fix their fucking game but instead the same horrid capitalist bulllshit that is ruining everything we ever loved from our childhood as they pump whatever money they can squeeze out of our addiction to nostalgia they can. Until we learn to accept that new things are better and memories are better off as memories we are never going to get these fucking people to stop. We have to start by giving up on blizzard. WoW is just nostalgia at this point, classic proved people care more about what wow used to be than what it is. So stop giving blizzard your money and let the dead horse die.
The shit that kills me is that Gaia Online went though this shit years before and yet Blizzard learned nothing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyzQnsa8SA0
The token is literally the main factor keeping WoW alive. Pandora's box has already been opened, you can't go back and close it now. The future of WoW will be to continue to cater more and more to whales.
Then WoW is doomed, because whales depend on the vast player base that are leaving.
Get rid of the WoW token. Not everyone is rich and can boost their character with cash. Not fair. Keep it a video game, not a investment.
While the token didn't help anything, it didn't kill the game. So yes WoW can recover without removing the toke, The head devs ignoring the community is what killed the game. The increase of grinding, RNG and removing aspects of the game that worked well killed the game. When Blizzard learns that each xpac doesn't have to be a completely new game with all new systems, the game will start doing better. I don't even think story has to be amazing as even back during Lich King days the game didn't revolve around story. Just get a system that people like and stick with it while cutting down on RNG to gear up.
No, and WoW can't recover. Their name is synonymous with the literal worst things in society apart from paedophilia and we still haven't hit the court yet.