Bellular On Preach Quitting WoW 

I love the analogy Preach used: "Blizzard is making us jump through the hoops. Then they make them smaller. Then they move them around. Then they lit them on fire. And then they say: 'Forget the hoops, they don't matter anyway.'"

How does a company focusing ever more on eSports, competitive games, and monetization handle their MMORPG? The same way they handle their eSports and competitive game. It's like someone asked, "how do we keep raiders from racing to BiS and quitting until the next content patch?" instead of "How do we provide a game world that RPGers want to log into and get lost in every day?"

"Why do players dislike Shards? They're basically tier sets." - As soon as I heard this, I knew all hope was gone. So out of touch.

Preach quitting and not covering WoW anymore, is really healthy for WoW. The game and devs need to see this shit, maybe then they will quit destroying a once masterpiece of MMO’s.

This is perhaps the largest paradigm shift we've seen in WoW with regards to the popularity of the game amongst the game's biggest advocates, content creators and players. It seems to be a real "foot down" moment. I hope Blizzard can get their shit together internally with a view to actually making the game fun again in the long term, but I won't be holding my breath.

I've always respected Mike for what he's taught fellow players. I respect him even more after making this decision, and his well articulated reasoning. He's far from alone.

In the end, it was foreseen: Only Wow could kill Wow. GG lol.

Blizzard needs to learn that having to do a lot is not the same as having a lot to do.

Back in BFA I would be sitting at my computer looking at the launcher's play button and thinking " uhh, I HAVE to do this and that and the other thing." Until that day I realized I don't have to (or really want to) push that launcher's Play button! 🙋‍♂️ Sure I had 10 years of progress and hundreds of dollars of Store items, various achievements and unlocks, & was (a minor) part of a raiding team. But at a certain point it just wasn't worth my time and subscription.

Hoo boy i can't wait to see Michael's reaction to JAB's resignation

I am one month WoW free and been playing final fantasy and I’m so much happier for it. I’m actually having fun playing an MMO again and I never thought that would happen. I recommend to everyone here that has not yet left WoW and are tired of Blizzards endless sh!t. Give it a go, at least! It won’t disappoint.

The only reason WoW is still alive is people feel theyve put too much into WoW to quit. All there hard work will be for nothing in their eyes...

I like Matt's analogies. They're so weird and specific but they get across such a relatable feeling.

Preach's video was rough to watch. He seems defeated and a little broken.

JABs stepping down classic company PR bs to try and make the idiots out there think there doing something but him stepping down was not what the employees asked for

The biggest problem of their designing is that everything is done as weekly chore thing. The reason why Mage Tower was so cool is that you didn't have to do it weekly like Torghast. Instead of doing everything a carrot on the stick they should create a sandbox.

quick question, loving the multiple channels but where is this show streamed? ty for the content guys!

The WoW content Preach is still going to make, Legacy and When It Was Best, have nothing to do with the current game. Mike is as done as it gets and even said so in the video.

It's insane that Preach didn't jump on FF14 early on when he did those boss videos that got tons of views. He could have caught the hype early and would be in such a better place, but now he's getting like 3 figure views playing goddamn new world of all things. It sucks to see it happen because I don't want him to fail but he really did not make the correct decisions here if he was gonna move away from wow.

This is all on Ion Hazzikostas. As an officer in Elitist Jerks, his whole thing was hardcore raiding and anyone that didn't agree was out. Elitist Jerks wasn't an unintentional name. His whole thing was and remains hardcore raiding. He never should have been promoted to the overall game director, but remained the lead of encounter design. But as game director, he's got executives telling him "Stop people from unsubbing after they clear the raids". So instead of adding casual content, or making the game alt-friendly and encouraging, his only go-to is "Make raiders do more". And that's where all the complex and time-gated systems come from. They're all focused around casuals being wannabe raiders, because he can't imagine anyone participating in the game long term for anything *but* raiding. And now it's self reinforcing. The hardcore raiders are the only ones regularly playing, because they're the only people the game is catering to, and even they're unsubbing between patches when they race through the content. There is no content for casual players who aren't raiders. Because Ion can't see how those people would remain interested in the game. And since there's no content, they don't, making him think he was right. They need to drop *all* the systems. Go back to the Wrath raiding model, simple encounter driven raiding with gear checks, and then provide *hours and hours* of non-raiding gameplay so that the raiders can do other things between patches, when they've cleared the whole raid. The fact that the game is built such that Mythic can be cleared with gear that isn't part of that tier, shows that they're capping the top end, to allow the bottom end to still experience the same content, because they can't imagine anyone wanting anything but high end raiding, and so to keep the casual subs it needs to be accessible. Solution: Make Mythic super hard. Make it mathematically impossible without 75% gearing *from that tier* . Require people to run the raid multiple weeks and gear up, before they can beat it. Then make *anyone* completing Mythic lauded. But on the flipside, make normal and even Heroic doable by average players, while they have fun. Undertune normal. Tune Heroic to the 2-3 night raid group. And then use all that extra time not wasted on Domination Shards and Conduit Energy, providing non-raiding interesting content like the Mage Tower from Legion, the various Achievements for things like World Events, add more normal dungeons per expansion, add cosmetic gear appearance drops to old content even if it's just recolors. Reuse the existing content for more formats, etc. Anything but "Raiding is everything and anyone playing needs to raid". It gimps the hardcore because casuals "need" to complete it, and ignores the casuals desire to do anything not raid related.

I was obsessed with doing all my dailies in TBC and Wrath. That became my thing. I had it to the point of doing 25 dailies in 30mins back then, it was my way of keeping up and prepared between raids. When they removed the daily cap in MoP, that I feel was the worst thing to me, because it never ended. It wasn't about "doing my chores to have fun", it just became an unending slog. I stopped in MoP with 500 to go to 10K dailies completed I'll admit, I still don't understand the concept of how Mythic+ works, but explaining that you can apparently get better gear by doing stuff outside your raids and need to do 10 15-mans a week to stay optimal....makes me glad I got out in MoP.

even in cata firelands i hated doing that firezone for the currency but i did like getting the purples from that venfor Sadge

The last straw for me was the nerf to gear drops in Shadowlands. What's the point in playing an MMO if I can't ever get upgrades?

Got a lot of time for Matt. Love this channel and he's been such a great addition. Keep up the good work lads!

I just realized, I've been watching almost every video that you guys have been putting out on this channel lately... and I wasn't subscribed. So I tappity tapped that sub button!

I love the Amaurot music being played hehe, very nice!

Look this pitcher was full to the brim for many people since WoD, a little bit of water evaporated from it during Legion but it was quickly replaced in BFA and the whole thing was waiting for that last drop that would make it overflow... and Blizzard started spraying it with high pressure hose in Shadowlands.

I recognize that Alex moukala amaurot remix anywhere, good stuff!

Good take as always fellas. Keep up the good work!

At around 12.35 when you said "ok cool" you activated my Google assistant 🤣

I’m in a similar boat to you. I love raiding with my team. Our goal is Heroic AOTC. I don’t want to do M+ and Torghast to be a competent performer in the content I want to engage with. So the problem Preach has isn’t that far off from the problems we have.

I remember coming back in BFA after being away since Cata, and finding it impossible to keep up and go back to experience some of the old content. Wow needs to do something about old content being usable.

hahaha...... You just made me realize I wasn't subscribed to my favorite talk show. I just kinda snuck on over and the algorithm kept me here. x_x

The whole situation with players having so much to do for just a little bit more power it’s just another example of gamers being gamed

Maybe all the forum posters that LARP as 1% mythic raiders will be a little quieter now.

I can feel for the raid bit, I love raiding but I'm soo tired of everything outside of the raiding we need to do to be able to keep up and not be benched.

Didnt you react to this earlier? I thought this was done a few videos ack

On my priest, I want to be able to be Venthyr for PVP, Kyrian for Disc, NF for Holy, and Necrolord for Shadow. But I cant really do this since Blizzard arbitrarily time gates covenant switching so i can play what i want when i want where i want. Very frustrating.

Bellular what is the name of your glasses frames? I am using 5 year old frames I got from the military and I need new glasses.

the casual community cant even ignore the shard system. theyve tuned torghast around having a 3set so not having it for layer 12 is awful

Did he watch the same video I did? it seems like Preach was pretty pissed off at how many perverts work at blizz, and that his morals meant more to him than money, something most of the WoW content creators cant say.

Bro, we all quit. It was gonna happen. Nothing could stop it. Finding out I could actually have a life after WoW was soooooooo refreshing.

PvPers are forced to do content they dont want. Loads of it. majority of people I talk too just wanna log in and cap and log out. Now we have to get conduits, torghast, renown, sockets, hours upon hours of content we don't want to do, but are basically forced too.

Imagine it taking this long to figure it out

I had a horrible experience with this game, going back 10 or so years ago, and I really haven't been able to let it go... I poured my life into this game. And it broke my heart. You see I'd been playing for years when MOP came out. With a new season of PVP ahead, I saw an opportunity to try and finish a season with a high rating and get rewards and achievements only offered to the top PVP players... Things like exclusive mounts and stuff were on offer for finishing the season with a high rating, and this was no minor feat I was attempting to accomplish... I put together a guild, and had over 20 good players to assemble 2 Rated Battleground Teams... (RBGs) It was a hard road, with many lessons learned along the way, but we were progressing through persistence and pure will and making our way up the ranking system. I was not the greatest leader in the world, and I made a lot of mistakes, but the thing that tore my guild apart was nothing I had any control over... You see one day we joined a RBG and the other team didn't... It was odd, to say the least... This was a Rated Battleground, and we were the only ones in it... So, we capped the 3 flags and took the easy win and queued for the next one. You wouldn't believe our luck! The other team didn't join the battleground again! We capped all 5 nodes and took the easy win... Our rating was climbing fast, and we hadn't had to do a thing... I was a little concerned, and hoped this wasn't going to come back and bite... As we joined the next game... Half my team didn't join... On voice chat (Vent) the cries of "MY ACCOUNT IS SUSPENDED" started coming in... Half my team had just had their account suspended, and I only had 5 players in a rated battleground.... Needless to say we got stomped that game... This broke our guild momentum, instantly. People were scared to even join an RBG game now. So I opened a ticket to Blizzard GMs and explained everything I just told you above. The response I received from Blizzard? "We can not discuss other players account bans with you" I wrote back and asked again: "As a guild leader what should I do in the event of another team not joining an RBG?" They responded with "What do you mean they didn't join?" I opened ANOTHER ticket, again explained my issue... "Other team didn't show up, resulting in my guild members being banned from game" Blizzard: "We can't discuss other players account bans with you" And on and on it went like this... Each ticket taking longer and longer to get a response, and every single ticket being replied to from a diferent GM, who I felt I needed to explain my problem all over again to... Blizzard responses alternating between "What do you mean the other team didn't join" and "We can't discuss other plays account bans with you" No matter how many times I wrote back. rewording, and re explaining my issue over and over I only ever received those two responses from Blizzard.... The issue completely destroyed my guild and my two RBG teams that I had put my entire life on hold to make... My one shot at finishing a PVP season with a good rank, my one shot at leading a winning team, torn away from me and I had no way of fixing it... It totally destroyed my will to play the game ever again...

Before the lawsuit was news I made the decision not to come back for 9.1 because I crafted my Legos during 9.0 in a slot that turned out to be a shards of domination slot. Zero interest in having to recraft a Lego just to put it in a different gear slot.

That Amh Araeng background music.

So now JAB is out too. I wonder what the new design direction will look like

The final straw for me was the destruction of casual PVP. When I had finished doing other stuff in BFA I could go do world PVP and random BGs, I loved the chaos of epic BGs. SL made that a complete waste of time. I quit just through boredom and loss of things to do.

WoW's shit anymore anyway. Good on Preach. There are plenty of good games out there.

That's a really good point on gear that wore me out as well. I enjoy mythic+ at the beginning of an expansion, but feeling the pressure to have to do 7-10 of them a week to maximize your vault gains wears thin after a couple of weeks.

People would always go on about how great the Great Vault is compared to the weekly box of disappointment in BFA. And in some respects it is BUT Blizzard had to add their own touch to it by making it super grindy also. 🤷‍♂️ I remember when blizzard first mentioned changing the weekly box. The first thing they said was maybe they would have it offer three items to choose from. That sounded perfect to me. 'Do X get a choice of three things!' 👍 but then they had to make it do A get 1 choice, do B get 2 choices, do C get 3choices... do I get 9 choices. So they just multiplied the grind! Just to lower the chances that you get s*** from RNG! 🤦‍♂️

There more people leave Blizzard for another employer, the better. Let that ship sink.

regarding having to run M+ in order to be optimal for raid; what if they introduced the same system to raid gear (and dungeon) as they did PVP, wherein the items jump X ilvls when in the relevant content? It removed the forced "you must run all content" that currently exists, allowing players to focus on the content they want to do. Adjust the drop rate of items accordingly of course

The only possible hope left for WoW is for a purge of the dev team - akin to the FFXIV reboot. This lawsuit might force that to happen, but I'm not getting my hopes up. Losing their main content creators - Preach, Asmon, in some ways Bellular - is a really, really big deal. Without them, the game will surely die. I'm sad to see WoW go, but if I'm being honest it's been dead for a few years now.

The chores and the hoops are the main thing that drove me away. When they transitioned from Alpha to Beta last year, and removed all the premade Legos/Soulbinds/Conduits/Covenants, the same time as they implemented Conduit Energy, and game was suddenly not fun and pointless having to jump though slow weekly gated progress. Heres the chores to jump though before fun potential features can be enjoyed. Just nope.

hmm, wonder what it'd have been like if they did with anima what they did with the suramar currency instead of...whatever the hell the current thing should be called other than chores

Just had a thought... Wow was doing good, Final Fantasy XIV 1.0 died, Square Enix looks to WoW for inspiration for 2.0. ARR is a success. Now WoW is 'dying'. Would Blizzard look to Final Fantasy XIV for inspiration? 😆 Just makes me chuckle to think that they would model themselves after a game that modeled their game after their game when it was popular. 🤪

We need more QUALITY AND QUANTITY of world content. When the only focus of most players is. Raid, log off. sucks. We need more world interesting world content.

Well, it aint just Mike that wow makes sad... the whole damn thing in general is pretty god damn sad.

FF14: "There is so much stuff i want to do!" Wow: "There is so much stuff i HAVE to do...."

What is that beeping?

"You get the best gear for Raiding from Spamming Mythic+ dungeons." Thats exactly the reason i quit active Raiding in Legion and only did some Raids with friends in BFA. And now in Shadowlands the gearing got shifted even more towards M+ and that combined with most of the people i played with no longer being active made me quit the Game.

The lawsuit helped me to commit to unsubbing. Before that, 9.1 released and i was not impressed. Its a reskinned, smaller scaled version of Timewalking, Argus, Nazjatar... etc. The rep isnt terribly important past a certain point. Korthia is lackluster at best. The raid is decent but im tired of paying $15/month to basically raid, do 1 M+ 10-15 and the forced Torghast runs. There is NOTHING else for a player like me to do. Farming useless things that have nothing to do with character power progression is pointless. I get more out of the lore from watching the likes of Bellular, Accolonn and others than i do out of the damn game and THAT should not be the case. New World looks promising for now and hopefully WoW will get back on track again for 10.0

4:09 the phrase you're struggling for is "hamster wheels"

why can't you react to his video? confused :(

They Banned Reckful when they should have made him head of PvP balance, they drove Preach to quit when they should have got him on board the Mythic team, so glad I didn't buy SL

Random comment... Pint has also started playing Final Fantasy XIV, and he looks nothing like his voice would make me think he looks like. 😆

I completely second Mike's view of the current game design and the viewer/dev relation.

This just sucks. I saw his video and all I could think about was that this was the end of an era. He was our voice and watching him make the video, broke my heart.

Ahm Araeng music catjam

I was always big on raiding. Gotten multiple CE's. This new tier I was hoping that raid logging would be feasible. It is so not. The added randomness with the vault pokies machine and pulling that weekly lever where time is my currency is just terrible. The dom gear making those options seemingly obsolete means you are there for mostly trinks and weps. 3 weeks of none of those was enough for me. I pulled out for this tier. All prior to the lawsuit. My time is more valuable than wow and its been freeing to let go of scheduled raiding in wow. Enjoying other games now. Im not surprised Preach stopped wow.

They know it is not a good system but they have to design systems like the shards, the conduits and running 10 M+ dungeons to increase player engagement - the only metric by which their game can be considered a success by the higher ups.

Can someone clip Matt doing the "fuck you from the door" please

I've had this analogy for WoW since BfA: Playing the game is like visiting a theme park in North Korea. You enter the park, and there's only one narrow path, and that path has a barbed wire fence on both sides. You also have security guards following you the entire time. That narrow path goes through every ride, even if you don't want to ride that ride, every food shop, even if you're not hungry, and the gift shop, even if you don't want to buy anything. And if you try to step off the path at all, or refuse to participate in something on that path, the guards beat your legs with sticks.

Do we remember the content everyone churned out during Legion?....just makes this expansion sadder really

I've done research about blizzard and activision merger (wiki). I don't know if people know that around 2013 french company Vivendi that hold majority shares in Activision Blizzard basically sold out. Its then when we saw more and more corporate and greed showing. WoD came out in 2014 and level boost appeared. I believe that Vivendi was holding all that back. edit: Also ingame shop was released in patch 5.4.2 December 11, 2013. Just few months after Vivendi was gone. It's pretty clear that as soon as 'blizz quality guardian' was gone they where forced to push WoD asap. Thats why it felt the way it felt

Conduit upgrades tho

I stopped playing retail in legion because I hated the endless AP grind. Every expansion after WoD just made the treadmill for raiding that much more painful. Even with all the hate WoD receives, it was the last time I enjoyed the game.

On the comments of M+ versus Raid gearing - everything should move up with raids. Normal should drop 239, Heroic 252, and Mythic even higher. I cleared a +16 M+ easy, no sweat, and will get a 252 piece. Progression on Heroic Sanctum is much harder right now, but a lower reward.

100% agree .. I am sick of doing 90% of things I do not enjoy, chores, to be able to do that 10% I enjoy. I don't mind grind at all, I grinded thousands of mobs in Aion per day to get a new weapon, now I am doing relic weapons in FFXIV, but in WoW, Torghast and many systems are so boring I had to unsub.

The nice thing about the grind in TBC and WotLK is that every grind had an end. You got your rep. You got your key. Etc. Etc.

Blizzard has fucked up big time. Honestly they would rather take a one year break to get their shit together and start again when all is good and ready. It will cost them short term but they have such a loyal playerbase that will bounch back if problems are fixed.

We want "so much staff we can do", not "so much staff we must do".

Same as pvp perspective. I play PVP because I want peak WoW challenge... Then Blizzard tells me I have to chore it up in the Maw and Torghast and Mythics doing stuff you could do with your eyes closed. When I spend more time doing those things than pvp, that's where I unsubbed.

Last 2 weeks I have litterally had less and less motivation to hit that play button. I realized I felt like I HAD to play the game rather than WANT to play the game. That was a realization...

Its a damn fulltime job. There is absolutely nothing relaxed in this game. I allrdy have a fulltime job. Gaming should be relaxing me.

Belluliar is an Widower.... Let the game rest in peace

You almost have to imagine that they are doing this engagement statistics... so when it launches a new expansion the numbers are nice and it takes people a while to figure out the flaws Katy Perry. And then they go about saying they're going to fix it so more people come back when the new patch comes out to see if they fixed it and the numbers rebound a bit and it takes people awhile to realize that they haven't really fixed it... and this goes on and on until the final patch where they get about as good as they can get it and that's what they have for the long time that you wait to play the next expansion... And in my mind they're using it so that you don't get burnt out in that long wait between the last packed in the next expansion... I might not make sense if you look at it like it's a black-and-white issue... But they're looking at it as how do we get these people to keep paying their monthly subscriptions and I believe they look at it like a game with no problems you get burnt out quick but a game with problems that they're fixing overtime I going to get people to login to check to see if it has been fixed... It might seem conspiratorial but there is no possible reason you can imagine them going down the same road over and over and over again doing the same things over and over and over again... the only other thing it could possibly be is that they're just incompetent okay.. And honestly I might have just talked myself into the latter

I fully agree with Preach on this. Im not a world first raider, just regular mythic and still I completely hate The Shards system. At this moment the only thing thats keeping me in the game is the guild im in. We do play other stuff together too and will meet up in december. But i honestly dont know if ill keep playing wow this long. Korthia is a chore and an empty shell for a new zone, the raid looks uninspired, the bosses are fine, M+ is a chore so is torghast and playing alts is certainly not gonna make me pay my subscription fee.

In the end you either love a game or think you do. I dont care for another turn coat. Rolling tbc like its the best game ever, wich it is. So gl hf.

I quit wow back during 2019, and recently started paying attention to what's going on again due to the news going on. I quit because I loved raiding I enjoyed doing mythic. And my guild increasingly pushed mythic+ dungeons on me to keep up. We were doing mythic Ghuun then came siege raid and boss said this many mythic+ a week at this key level. and had a program to check my progression. I didn't like pugging I asked him, can I sub in on your group. No. Can I sub in another team on the raid team, no. Find it yourself, I quit. I wanted to come back and just see the story play the content of a game I've played since '06 and now see this.

Moved on to FFXIV. Not sure if I will ever go back to WoW. If I do I am going to approach the game VERY differently. The game can only hold my attention for a few weeks so I'll wait until the end of an expansion to burn through the content all at once before I lose interest.

Regarding unnecessarily complicated systems and reinventing bad systems again and again, Blizzard devs could stand to learn from cooking competition shows. There are certain tropes/memes that have emerged as a result. The majority of the time a chef presents "X three ways" or the like, they fuck up one of them, essentially ruining the entire dish. There have been times on Top Chef where a competitor made this mistake and the judges said that one component was the best of the night, but the failure of the other component was why they had to pack their knives and go. Then there are those chefs that try to do everything all at once, perturbing the judges with lack of message or too many conflicting flavor systems or the primary ingredient getting lost in the crowd. I could go on, but it's not necessary. Anybody who has played the last several WoW expansions gets the point whether they've seen any of these cooking shows or not. Blizz devs, please watch some Top Chef and Chopped.

We lost Preach, Pyro flipped his shit, The Dread Expanse said goodbye in a 90 second clip, and my wife saw the confusion from both me AND Nobbel simultaneously during the Elune cinematic reaction vid. I fully expect Nobbel and Accolon are hanging on by a thread…

Saw this coming in WoD when the mission table was a thing, and they didnt scrap it at the end. All the while scraping the good systems. They double down on easy for them content "missions tables" And triple down on systems that are boring, mindless, and required repeditive shit "soul ash" its not new, its content dating back to wod... with new names and wallpaper. - soul ash, conduits, etc. none of its original. think. all the while, taking away stuff each step of the way. skills, gear sets. and in the latest expac, actual content and item quantities. i keep coming back at the beginning of each expac hoping its better, and its always worse, im done for good this time. I think once wow channels stop showing up in my YT feed ill even stop there too.

I like these guys but jeeeeez, the goatee boy!! he speaks as if every statement he makes will blow your mind.

I'm aiming for curve too, then i'll probably take a pause at least untill next tier.

I was raid logging in TBC before the article broke. Raided for only another week as a last hoorah before I canceled my sub for good

At this point any one still subbed to WoW or any blizzard property is signing off on the AB company policies, official or otherwise, the only way they will change is if the money is effected.