Blizzard is Apparently Surveying Former Subscribers About World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth - MM

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Blizzard is Apparently Surveying Former Subscribers About World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth - MMORPG.com

It appears that Blizzard Entertainment is making "good" on its recent commitment to better player communication. A round of surveys have been sent out to recent World of Warcraft subscribers who have since left the game after having played the Battle for Azeroth expansion. Questions run across a broad spectrum of topics including how likely a player might be to return to WoW if concerns were addressed and many others.

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gervaise1

wow!

Galadourn

that's indeed worthy of a 'wow'...

MadFrenchie

Would you say BfA made the game better or worse?

The art and world design made the game better. The endgame content design, Azerite armor, GCD and secondary trait changes made the game worse.



I have to say, it's telling not that Blizzard is starting an initiative to gather feedback... It's telling that they're aiming that initiative directly at folks that have literally tried and already quit the expansion. That seems to indicate the number of folks who have done so is significant.

Asch126

"How likely would you be to play World of Warcraft again if your concerns were addressed?"

......wow. They have finally reached a level where they were actually forced to ask this because, SOMEHOW, it was not 100% obvious.

MadFrenchie said:

Would you say BfA made the game better or worse?



The art and world design made the game better. The endgame content design, Azerite armor, GCD and secondary trait changes made the game worse.







I have to say, it's telling not that Blizzard is starting an initiative to gather feedback... It's telling that they're aiming that initiative directly at folks that have literally tried and already quit the expansion. That seems to indicate the number of folks who have done so is significant.

Almost like the "leak" that showed sub numbers below 2M was not as fake as people thought.

calibek

One thing you can insinuate is that their sub base must have been hit HARD. I think everyone can agree that turnover in the MMO field is quite high simply because people come and go. I, myself, have quite WoW and gone back easily a dozen time in 14 years. With the amount of subs they have (had?) I think they knew that people would come and go and there would be heavy fluctuations with their numbers. Honestly, for them to start to send out surveys and such it must mean they have been hit pretty hard with sub losses.

Whiteshade92

I think they do this survey for only us playerbase

ACommonMugger

They really dropped the ball with gear in this one.

After legion's artifact weapons, this all seems super awful to me. I really liked the artifact weapons, and to have them just be thrown away is kind of annoying to me.

Viper482

All they have to do is read their own freaking forums and see the most common topics that people bring up to complain about.

Or hell......LISTEN TO YOUR BETA TESTERS freaking morons. Everything people dislike about BfA was brought up during beta. Blizzard is run by idiots right now, period. And I did not receive a survey so I wonder how they are deciding who gets one.

Viper482

halfmystic said:

They really dropped the ball with gear in this one.



After legion's artifact weapons, this all seems super awful to me. I really liked the artifact weapons, and to have them just be thrown away is kind of annoying to me.

Same. When they announced artifact weps would be going away after Legion I quit because why bother grinding out an artifact weapon when it would be taken away?

Octagon7711

They should go the extra mile and send out surveys to people who didn't buy the last expansion but perhaps did buy the one before and find out why. Anyways surveys are a good start and perhaps they will even start listening to their beta testers.

Xingbairong

Viper482 said:

halfmystic said:

They really dropped the ball with gear in this one.





After legion's artifact weapons, this all seems super awful to me. I really liked the artifact weapons, and to have them just be thrown away is kind of annoying to me.

Same. When they announced artifact weps would be going away after Legion I quit because why bother grinding out an artifact weapon when it would be taken away?

I never understood the idea of getting something(artifact weapon for example) and wanting to play with it till the end of time. What's the point in that. Where's the joy in that? Isn't it all about getting new stuff etc...

As for BfA... It's 10 times better than Legion, but it's still really bad.
1st. It's riddled with bugs. Bugs which should've been fixed before launch, yet for some reason are still there and it doesn't seem like they plan on removing them.
2nd. There were a lot of great ideas, BUT it feels like Blizzard either didn't had the time or the motivation to actually do them properly. Both Island Expeditions and Warfronts could've been sooooooo much better, but it feels like they didn't put any effort after their initial idea about them which is sad.
3rd. Azerite gear is just plain bad. It's better than artifact weapons, but it's more than obvious that they never really thought the traits through.
4th. Class imbalance... Some classes were so overlooked that it was just sad. Ele shamans, Shadow Priests. It's ridiculous when you get declined with 355 gear for +2 mythic 29/30 times... That's just sad.

I hated Legion. The Artifact Weapon system was butchered. They made it impossible to play with more than 1 spec, nevermind alts unless you were a streamer or jobless + the legendaries made things just worst due to the huge difference in their benefits, BUT EVEN THEN it was more polished by a thousand times than BfA.

So content and idea-wise BfA is 10 times better, but polish-wise it's just sad. This is a beta and there's no point in trying to hide it.

I've always been a huge fan to Blizzard games, especially WoW, but this time around I can't really defend them. Hard to do it when I log daily to put stuff on the AH check for some WQ that gives resource that can sell for good amount of gold and logout.

People hated on the Garrison and to some extent on the dumbed down version that's the Class Hall, but at least they gave you some other stuff to do if everything else was in the toilet.

malroth67

So NOW they care? Yea right, too little too late. BFA is timegating on steroids, all MMORPG's have timegating to some extent, the timegating however is NOT a feature like it is with BFA, every little thing in BFA is timegated, and it is because the content is lacking or just plain not fun to do. People like to say BFA is WoD 2.0, but I think it is worse, I actually had fun in WoD leveling up, not in BFA. It doesn't help that the new 'feature's' of BFA were garbage, island expeditions were awful, that new scenario that was supposed to be like an RTS but isn't that is so forgettable that I actually forgot what it was called, and the debacle of gear and how they have handled it. After all that AND add in the constant contempt and arrogance of the developers, yea I wonder why people left /smh

They use 'alpha' and 'beta' as nothing more than a marketing tool now to get people to play the game, because they sure as heck don't care about people actually testing the game. All of these issues and more were brought up then, they didn't care one bit and ignored us all. So until I see some changes in personnel, especially at the top, I will not ever play that game again, and I have played it all since early alpha of original/classic WoW.

Kabulozo

I suspect the number of players that already left is so huge that Blizzard really need to take action, even Legion was able to hold players for more time.

meonthissite

Perhaps people should start taking "I Quit" posts more seriously?!

Here's to hoping they get the message on quite a few things.

For example they still haven't quite fixed the classes, Sin/Sub Rogue and BM Hunters!

MadFrenchie

Xingbairong said:

Viper482 said:

halfmystic said:

They really dropped the ball with gear in this one.





After legion's artifact weapons, this all seems super awful to me. I really liked the artifact weapons, and to have them just be thrown away is kind of annoying to me.

Same. When they announced artifact weps would be going away after Legion I quit because why bother grinding out an artifact weapon when it would be taken away?

I never understood the idea of getting something(artifact weapon for example) and wanting to play with it till the end of time. What's the point in that. Where's the joy in that? Isn't it all about getting new stuff etc...

As for BfA... It's 10 times better than Legion, but it's still really bad.
1st. It's riddled with bugs. Bugs which should've been fixed before launch, yet for some reason are still there and it doesn't seem like they plan on removing them.
2nd. There were a lot of great ideas, BUT it feels like Blizzard either didn't had the time or the motivation to actually do them properly. Both Island Expeditions and Warfronts could've been sooooooo much better, but it feels like they didn't put any effort after their initial idea about them which is sad.
3rd. Azerite gear is just plain bad. It's better than artifact weapons, but it's more than obvious that they never really thought the traits through.
4th. Class imbalance... Some classes were so overlooked that it was just sad. Ele shamans, Shadow Priests. It's ridiculous when you get declined with 355 gear for +2 mythic 29/30 times... That's just sad.

I hated Legion. The Artifact Weapon system was butchered. They made it impossible to play with more than 1 spec, nevermind alts unless you were a streamer or jobless + the legendaries made things just worst due to the huge difference in their benefits, BUT EVEN THEN it was more polished by a thousand times than BfA.

So content and idea-wise BfA is 10 times better, but polish-wise it's just sad. This is a beta and there's no point in trying to hide it.

I've always been a huge fan to Blizzard games, especially WoW, but this time around I can't really defend them. Hard to do it when I log daily to put stuff on the AH check for some WQ that gives resource that can sell for good amount of gold and logout.

People hated on the Garrison and to some extent on the dumbed down version that's the Class Hall, but at least they gave you some other stuff to do if everything else was in the toilet.

I have been having trouble staying logged in, too.  When many of the WQ rewards scale to 5-10 iLvls below your current iLvl, and the ones that don't feature your most useless secondaries, I have no motivation to complete those WQs.  Like you, I look for resource rewards, and if there aren't any worth pursuing, I log back off.

I want to start Mythic, but I've heard there's just too many folks trying to run them that I don't think my 34X iLvl rogue will reliably get groups to run them with.

Raapnaap

I did not get a survey, but I'll add that I've played every WoW expansion and can say I enjoyed WoD more than BfA (like, significantly more despite the lack of content patches).

Nothing about BfA felt fun or meaningful; The (Horde) story is a rush job with most of it not even voice acted, the content and systems and neither fun or new, nothing about the game felt 'relevant', even the most basic ingredient of a WoW expansion - leveling - was made redundant due to the lack of actually gaining anything from it (in fact you were actually losing access to things as you leveled).

The whole thing feels like a filler expansion, and coming after Legion - which was arguably their best expansion to date - this just left me with a bad taste.

Could they fix it? I don't think they could. The expansion is missing too much, they'd effectively need to take 6 months of closed development time and re-launch it with all feedback worked into it.

For now, BfA holds a record for me; It's the fastest expansion I dropped out of, I didn't even last a full month. With the way it went, I am even convinced this is the last expansion for the game.

ACommonMugger

Xingbairong said:

Viper482 said:

halfmystic said:

They really dropped the ball with gear in this one.







After legion's artifact weapons, this all seems super awful to me. I really liked the artifact weapons, and to have them just be thrown away is kind of annoying to me.

Same. When they announced artifact weps would be going away after Legion I quit because why bother grinding out an artifact weapon when it would be taken away?

I never understood the idea of getting something(artifact weapon for example) and wanting to play with it till the end of time. What's the point in that. Where's the joy in that? Isn't it all about getting new stuff etc...



As for BfA... It's 10 times better than Legion, but it's still really bad.

I stopped reading rrriiiggghhhtt there. It's not about "getting something and wanting to play with it till the end of time", it's about the fact they implemented a system for one expansion, based EVERYTHING around that system, then straight up abandoned that system in the next expansion. If you think that's alright, then there's just something fundamentally wrong in your view point - not that fact that people enjoyed the system.

Cazriel

Even though we knew going into Legion that we would lose our Artifact weapon, it still feels bad. I'm just tired of every expansion being a new mini-game. They move Dalaran around, why not our garrisons? Why replace Artifacts with the completely underwhelming Azerite system when it is so blatantly inferior? Why didn't they take Pandaran cooking and make it continually meaningful?

Just think of how robust the game would be right now if they had sought to incorporate rather then diminish and exclude. It's like they are a bunch of junkies looking for an ever greater high, incapable of recognizing the good stuff they already have.

ACommonMugger

Cazriel said:

Even though we knew going into Legion that we would lose our Artifact weapon, it still feels bad. I'm just tired of every expansion being a new mini-game. They move Dalaran around, why not our garrisons? Why replace Artifacts with the completely underwhelming Azerite system when it is so blatantly inferior? Why didn't they take Pandaran cooking and make it continually meaningful?

Just think of how robust the game would be right now if they had sought to incorporate rather then diminish and exclude. It's like they are a bunch of junkies looking for an ever greater high, incapable of recognizing the good stuff they already have.

This. It's people like the former posts who think that scraping old content is good in favor of new, less enticing content. Why not just make the old systems .. better?


It's so ridiculous to me, the mind set of some of these people. I'll never understand the want of "ok I did everything in this continent, lets drop everything we did and go onto something new" mentality. Every other game in the world, except for MMOs, builds upon it's former releases and yet, WoW just makes new stuff without even touching the old.  I understand Blizz needs to scale back after an expansion, but they do so in a way that just leaves WASTE LAND after DESERT of dried up content that means nothing.

FFS even the legion, WoW's old time enemy since.. FOREVER means nothing now. It's all looking forward and never back, and it's just getting tiresome. 

Kabulozo

Rhoklaw said:

Dear Blizzard,

I will play Warcraft 4 before I ever buy another WoW expansion and I purchased my last one almost a decade ago. You have Starcraft 2, so where is Warcraft 4?

SC2 never reached the success of the first one, mainly in korea where it was much more popular than in any other country.

What makes you believe they can make a WC4 better than WC3 in an age where MOBAs burried RTS in popularity?

ACommonMugger

Rhoklaw said:

Dear Blizzard,

I will play Warcraft 4 before I ever buy another WoW expansion and I purchased my last one almost a decade ago. You have Starcraft 2, so where is Warcraft 4?

This dream/meme is dead - the horse is rotting and showing bones at this point.

Scot

I left about ten years ago, nothing in the post yet.

MadFrenchie

Scot said:

I left about ten years ago, nothing in the post yet.

From the post, it appears they are specifically targetting players who tried BfA and have since unsubbed.

My own expires 11/16, and isn't currently going to be renewed.  8.1 has good things, but there's just so much wrong with the endgame content, classes, and combat in general at the moment.

It's an unpopular design direction coupled with poor implementation.  A double whammy.   

JeffSpicoli

I was surprised when i cancelled they had removed the exit survey, Even more surprised when i was called a troll by the dicks on the general forums because i started a thread explaining why i was leaving. Does Blizz value feedback anymore ? I guess its good they are at least making somewhat of a effort now.

GeezerGamer

Blizz!
"Dance with the one that brung ya"