The Queue: Overcompensating a bit there, Blizzard

Lots of great questions in this Queue, thanks for them. Had a joy answering them. Let’s get down to business.

This is what we’ve referred to as the pendulem for a long time. Blizzard something really good, then they think they’ve done something really bad and swing the meter the entire other way. And you’re entirely correct to point out the disparity between Wrath heroics and Cataclysm heroics. In Wrath, heroics were a simple AoE fest most of the time. I remember having a geared hunter and doing nothing but AoE late in the expansion. In Cataclysm, however, the heroics ended up to be way too hard. Grim Batol? !@#$ that. Even in timewalking instances groups still wipe there. To Blizard’s credit, they did tune them down a bit, but the first couple months of the expansion were incredibly painful.

I think we are going to see a few things changed though.

First, I suspect that the mob scaling is going to get softened up a bit — the way the end game mobs scale to your level tends to give you the feeling that you’re not getting over powered as much as “keeping up” with the rest of the denziens of the Broken Shore. That’s not necessarily the feeling you want as a player; being over powered is cool and is something a lot of people work towards (now whether you realize it or not is an entirely different thing). My guess is that they’re not going to scrap this system, but they are going to decrease the curve such that mobs don’t scale as high and as fast.

Second, I also see them doing something different with reputation grinds overall. The extra chest that you get when you get 10,000 rep from a faction already at exalted is a nice stop gap measure, but it also points to a bandaid solution in a system that is somehow fundementally flawed. World Quests made rep grinding a fun thing over the long term, and I can see Blizzard doing something like making more reputations generally available to hit in the WQ grind.

And finally, World Quests… Blizzard is going to double down here. Triple down here. Dodecatouple down here. Mark my words, this system is the future of WoW and if Legion has taught them one thing, it’s that using the entire expansion’s map for questing at max level is a damn good thing. Next up? I bet World Quests appear in every zone ever made.

Boom.

So they do have editors for their RTS games, of course. Incredibly robust too. But you’re right, they don’t have them for WoW or other games. It’s been speculated several years ago that they might release a dungeon builder tool that other MMOs have (Neverwinter, Star Trek, EQ2, etc…). Could they? Yes. Will they? I doubt it.

The community content craze has sort of died down and one of WoW‘s strength is such a strong community surrounding strong content; if it’s a strong community surrounding weak content, I’m not sure that’d hold up. The same goes for HotS and Overwatch too. Maps make up a huge part of that strong content Blizzard offers, and despite all of our armchair quarterbacking, we’re never going to be able to create such strong content as Blizzard’s game designers.

There’s also general concern about abuse of the system in these types of things; people finding fast ways to level up just by doing player generated content that’s easier than the main game. This can be the case, however there’s also ways around it (like only rewarding experience upon completion on a dungeon that’s 30+ minutes long, and making the experience once a day, etc…).

It’s been replaced with BlizzCon stuff, but I’ll talk with folks to see if we can put it back.

One thing about being the boss, is that 99.9999% of the time people have a good reason to do something and you should probably just step back and let ’em do it.

I don’t think this is that odd. I’m a sucker for SciFi MMOs, and as terrible as some can be, I still jump in and enjoy the future. Star Wars: The Old Republic (which I’m not calling terrible really, as much as a flawed end game) is like that for me. It’s a really pretty game with the same type of timeless aesthetics that Blizzard titles typically have, and the way they bring the world to life is pretty amazing (now if they’d just keep that world alive after you’ve played through it once … that’d be another story).

Guild Wars 2 hits that mark as well, although it was always a bit more annoying for me since they didn’t have mounts. But with the latest expansion, and part of the core gameplay simply being exploration, it hits the mark nicely and I’ve found myself playing more to get the vistas, etc…

And then there’s EVE… that which sits on my computer daring me to open it again. But I do find a good spreadsheet fun to look at. I’m just weird like that.

We’re nearing (at?) the end of the expansion and I think it’s a natural thing that people drop off. Right now I’m mainly logging in to farm for some long standing mounts (ZG) and doing world quests. It’s enough WoW for me each day. Sometimes I’ll hit up various other things, and I’d like to get the fishing legendary before the expansion ends, but that’s pretty much it.

There’s a ton of other good games to explore; isometric RPGs that are up there with Baldur’s Gate II and DLCs for games like Dragon Age: Inquisition that I’ve never played through. When WoW is at a lull I tend to hit these up a lot, and I think that’s quite natural.

Don’t beat yourself up, play something else, or read a book, etc… I’m hopeful that Blizzard will only build upon the success of Legion and the next expansion [REDACTED] will be even better.

For me it’s WoW, although I’ve been slowly getting more and more into Overwatch.

WoW takes the top because I’m at the point where I’ve gear out my main about as much as I can, leveled a few alts, and am just sitting back enjoying killing demons and collecting rewards. As I mentioned above there’s not much else for me to do at the moment, and that’s a-okay. Pew pew pew (or whatever the sound arrows make from my hunter’s bow).

Overwatch has been something I’ve enjoyed the lore and concept of, but haven’t really been able to get into — and even now I wouldn’t say I’m into it per-se, as much as enjoying playing a few matches every night before bed. I recently moved my PS4 into my bedroom, and the wife goes to sleep much faster and earlier than I do, so I use the time to just sit there and pretend to heal or shoot at things. I suck at it, but it’s fun.