I'm always fascinated to hear your unique insights, dude. Thanks for making the content. I remember watching you back in wrath or something like that and then it felt like we had a guy on the inside when you started working for Blizzard, but I guess that's always been the case(with more recent interviews I see more and more that the devs are just past players that have now joined blizz). You have a really interesting perspective having gone from youtube content creator/player to community manager/working with developers to back to content creator/possibly player(?). I find the human nature toward fixing things to be overall a very positive thing, but you're right that forums specifically tend to be just cesspools of negativity. I've felt that way for a really long time, and even if I try to go on there to let the developers know what I 'do' like, I just get a bunch of nasty commentors that go and inspect my whole b.net account and try to pick apart what kind of player I am and tell me why I'm wrong about what I like and how the way that I play are likely the reasons or something like that. Literally things like "you're competitive and competent enough to..." "but you're still casual enough to...," and they really don't know me or what I'm doing across all my characters, and I don't need that. The overall experience on both the WoW forums and WoWhead forums has always been tremendously negative, and anyone posting/replying always seems to have 10s of thousands of negative comments posted on their history, so I imagine they're just living miserable lives ruminating in negativity literally all the time, and they're just kinda venting or unleashing that at anyone that steps into their domain. WoWhead forums in particular are some of the most negative people I've seen in any game, I don't comment on there, but I see them all the time, complaining about every announcement or discussion topic, in most times just very unhelpful ways. The general "this announcement sucks" or WoW has sucked for X number of years straight. I've always wished they would do polls on the b.net launcher or maybe a pop-up kinda thing when you login, or maybe even something you need to open the support pane in-game to access(if pop-ups upon login are too egregious for people), but just something that let's us let blizz know what we 'do' like and what maybe we could vote on ideas that the developers are having that we would like to see explored more. I was in the group of disappointed people for SL, but man DF has been freaking incredible, I think it's a contender for the pinnacle of WoW PvE for all time. I think I have Legion still slightly higher as both the story felt epic and the PvE was only slightly less fantastic, but DF is solidly my #2 now as the PvE is 'way' better than wrath was(maybe not wraths fault and just that it's dated at this point), but wrath's story felt lot more epic. I might just be biased also as I don't enjoy seeing proto-dragons in any meaningful roles, they look like you smashed a t-rex with an acme anvil and slapped some wings on it. I have to imagine fyrrak has been so inexplicably angry because he has those tiny arms and he just can't pick anything up in his natural form. Xalatath on the otherhand, I'm very interested for, so the prospects of future WoW xpacs is looking incredible. If they keep up what they're doing, I think WoW is going to be the best it has ever been.
I'm probably in a minority but I really don't care about knowing all the details of the game development process, about devs "listening" etc. I find it weird that modern day gamers often treat game developers as their local politicians, expecting them to listen to all their complaints and all that. I want to have fun in games not assist devs in making them.
Should be a content warning about how Lore completely ages himself with his mention of when he was first talking about gaming on the internet. 😆 Great show as always.
I think that beyond negativity bias, there's also been a shift in tone over the last decade or so, leading to a more 'adversarial/hostile' relationship between players and mainstream video game companies. Not to say it was all happy and fair game before, but I feel like the gaming industry (specifically AAA companies) have tightened the screws of scheming and manipulation with all sorts of practices to increase revenue. Broken launches, day 1 DLCs, 'early access' pre-orders, abusive/coercive micro/macro-transactions, and many many other things on a long scummy list of practices of 'make the line go up' year after year. Meanwhile, social medias have never been more populated and information so easily accessible, leading to a broader awareness and tiredness with these companies and their practices. And when the publisher's scummy efforts are sucking every cent out of you has already ground your gears before you've even played the game, it's a lot easier to go post a negative/angry/toxic 'feedback' post when smth isn't going well with your experience. In other words, we're long past the "Yeah, the framerate was a bit unstable, but I liked the story," in favour of a "I paid 70$ for this shit, half the game's cosmetics are on an expensive cash-shop, there's EXP-boosts on this single player game which I can't play offline, they've made it slow to progress so I'd buy the damned boosts, and it's the 3rd time I die because the game's freezing mid-combat, [insert toxic forum rant]." Honestly this can apply to the mainstream bulk of most entertainment industries these days. Yes there are exceptions and good surprises, and yes, there were scummy practices in the past too, but I feel like things have never felt more expensive and exploitative, while often providing underwhelming, under-cooked and compromised experiences. PS: Meanwhile, we keep hearing abt lay-offs after lay-offs, on top of abuse scandals, union-busting and other corpo-capitalist depravities. So even if you're just having fun with indie games and staying away from the mainstream industry, you've got reasons to be hostile to big publishers. And to be clear, I do mean big publishers and companies, not the devs working for them.
Not disagreeing,but you left out arcade games were designed for you to put X quarters in an hour. Lots of shitty games existed way back and adjusted for inflation those also cost about 70 bucks. Those were also disc/cartridge games that couldn’t be refunded if opened in most places, so you just wasted your money. If the manufacturer wanted to fix them, the tech didn’t exist to patch them. The work non-sense existed and was probably worse. The minute companies could sell items via the internet they did. They did that before via mail order. It may have gotten worse, but you are just more aware of it now than then.
I swear lately wow's general forums have been the most positive I've ever seen them in the 15ish years I've been avidly reading them. But it could also be that because this is the least engaged with warcraft I've ever been I just don't know which topics to look at to find the really deep cesspools right now.
Yeah haha, in following AoC's open development you hear steven always constantly repeating and repeating that the games not finished yet and still under development.
you say you researched the negativity, but you left out a company's track record playing a big part in it. fromsoft is one example (not big enough company?) bethesda is another until the last 6 years where they have been making lots of mistakes. i think you have a lot of bias on one side of this. most game forum ive been on are about 90%/10%. 10% being the negativity, it only gets worse when the company dose something anti player friendly. before that the negative players get drowned out. but hey what do i know im just a gamer
I have a long-winded question for you. In 2012ish, you posted a video on the Zam channel that was entitled "The Casualization of Hardcore Raiding." The video has been taken down, but the jist of it was the fact that 10 man heroic raiding had become so prevalent, that it was making hardcore raiding much more accessible and thus losing its prestige. With the advent of 20 man mythic raiding the last 10 years, there was a steep divide amongst some regarding the change and many have asked for a return of 10 man mythic content. I was fervently against a 10 man version, however, after trying to run a mythic guild earlier this expac, I am backtracking a bit and would like to see a 16 man mythic as the roster boss hits hard and is undefeated. Do you think reducing mythic raid size is a good thing? Thoughts?
