Xeno Reacts to Preach RAGING at Ion Interview & WoW Community Council 

What I find funny is when Preach mentions that the casual player base is more silent about what they don't like and yeah it's true because we don't bother complaining. Most of us casual people just leave and don't come back, at leas that's what I did.

>all these WoW players love the Gold Saucer We're recovering from our RNG addictions... this is our methadone.

Preach told Ion and blizzard about every problem not only in shadowlands but also BFA with Azerite armor. They ignored all his suggestions then made the changes year later

I feel like the community council lacks any merit when the people on the council are selected by Blizzard instead of the community. It becomes the council of voices Blizzard wants to hear, when it should be the council of voices the community wants blizzard to listen to. At the least half the council should be voted in by the community.

Its so fun to see Xeno instantly pick up what the problems are while not even being a wow player. That means that even if the devs dont play their own game (which I dont think they do) they still have no excuse for not seeing these issues.

I like Preach's personality, its nice to have his opinion on more games theese days and not locked into a single abusive relationship anymore

The reason why most of the wow players are surprised by the Golden Saucer is because we didn't have anything like that in our game. The closest thing we got, the Darkmoon Fair, happened only once a month for the first week and you only went there really for the exp buff for your alts. Sure you had games like Whack a Mole and Ring Toss but those got old fast.

the "we got him bois" had me rolling LMAO

Is it weird that I’m infinitely more interested in Xeno’s react content than watching him do a raid he’s already done for the 100th time? I guess it just feels like we see more of Xeno being Xeno in this context as he’s not devoting most of his concentration to the fight. I feel like I know more about Xeno’s personality and opinions now from the past 3-4 months than I did from following his streams for YEARS! Also, props to the editor because if it wasn’t for him we wouldn’t get such regular content on the channel.

Thinking about both FF (the entire franchise) and WoW, I learned I loved fantasy, games and narratives when I booted up FFI on the NES about a million years ago and I met my husband playing WoW in BC. Uninstalling Bnet and WoW was one of the hardest things I ever did. It didn't feel like it was time to move on, it felt like I had been absolutely betrayed by a friend.That game literally changed my life for the better. Next year will be my 10th wedding anniversary and my husband and I plan on getting married / renewing our vows in FF14, because nothing says I'm done with your bullshit like gettin' hitched in a whole new game.

53:30 It wasn't just Preach, as someone who was in beta, this was the number one topic of pretty much everyone with easily 75 - 80% of the people saying it was a huge problem, and even the ones who defended most were like "let's just see how Blizzard deals with it because I trust them" and of course there were a few odd "No, I like not being able to play what I want" Blizz fanboys who will back them no matter what they do. People not liking player power being tied to a Covenant choice which was incredibly difficult to switch was the most predicable thing that could have happened with Shadowlands.

Preach is 100% right with wows developers not listening to people. Covenants in shadowlands were pitched to us as an rpg element, ment to be a choice for players to make based on their preference. Hey y'all like vampires and gothic stuff? Venthyr is for you, like angels? Bastion Wahoo. But instead of covenants being based on preference, they attached player power to it. And in a way that completely removed your choice if you want to do well. Oh you're an affliction warlock and you wanna be a venthyr? Reeeeally leaning into that life draining thing huh? Cool cool. You're going bastion with the angels because you get a spell specific to them that actively makes you do more damage. On top of that the soulbinds, basically passive effects based on the covenant you chose, were never going to be balanced. Ever. And it was foolish to think it was ever going to be balanced. So if you care at all about your dps or hps or whatever. You don't have a choice. And if that wasn't bad enough, blizzard keeps buffing and nerfing said soulbinds while making the spells you get from the covenants essentially useless in comparison. So now you're a capped affliction warlock in a covenant you don't like because the spell is good and the soulbind you went with is busted overpowered. You log in one day and oops. Your busted overpowered soulbind has been nerfed and another one is better. So good in fact that just having that soulbind over there would boost your damage more than the current covenant spell and soulbind you have combined. Time to swap covenants to one that you probably dislike even more than what you had. A warlock hanging out with angels? You can live with that you guess. But going to night fae with the fairies and dryads and trees? And the spell you get sucks but that delicious passive increase to damage for doing literally nothing. You hate it, but you'll do it. You have no choice but to bend over. For the sake of damage, you'll do it. I just described my time in shadowlands and it's only a fraction of the problems. I just wanted to hang out with vampires bro like why. Everyone in alpha and beta told blizzard the covenants should just be cosmetic. And they essentially told us we're wrong.

They introduce it so passive aggressively. "There is a lot of feedback and we want to examine the more nuanced feedback" Translation: "We are tired of hearing from you. Everyone we disagree with we will dismiss as not being nuanced enough."

37:30 As a tank, I was regularly and heinously insulted and told to kill myself during my journey to achievements like "Ahead of the Curve" and "Keystone Master". Blizz takes absolutely no action against such toxicity. Which is why we all turn toxic in the end.

"All these WoW players love the gold saucer" Can confirm when I joined I spent 3 solid days only playing gold saucer games. I think it's the novelty of side content that's self contained and fun and has interesting rewards for things that aren't combat related. WoW has a dangerous shortage of that kind of content, and the Darkmoon Faire is a terrible supplement to it (that's only available 1 week a month! What the hell! It KIND of made sense when it was a travelling faire but now they're fucking open one week a month at their camp spot that never moves JUST BECAUSE FUCK YOU!)

The WoW developers seem so damn fake, like they are being held at gun point to say what they have been told.

The person leaving isn’t always the toxic one, that’s why you can’t just carte blanche punish them. If anyone joining the key isn’t prepared, whether the key leader didn’t check their ilvl, how well they’ve done in that dungeon in the past (an in game metric now, no addon required), or someone just decides they don’t want to try to participate in the goal or m+ (they care about their parse more than interrupts, cc, or mechanics and screw everyone over), then the person leaving can leave after 10 mins rather than having everyone waste 30 mins on a fruitless endeavor. That’s why reports exist and you can’t automate punishments, the really toxic person in that party is either the key holder who didn’t care about their time or the time of the people they invited or the person who didn’t show up prepared and doesn’t respect the others’ times.

I wonder how many editors Xemo have, notice he's been reacting a lot lately, wouldn't doubt if he's planning on uploading them all, but don't know how much work that would be for his editor. Been loving this guys content since HW, great to see him pop off these last few months ❤.

hour 24 minutes? better get the popcorn

If you would like to get even more of a picture of his reason to rage, just watch his previous interviews with ian. The extreme sassy answers he gets were borderline straight insults even back then and now they implemented almost everything he talks about in those interviews... it is such shitty pr bullshit

Thanks for uploading this to RU-vid!

Dude, Pray for Preach. He starts playing PoE/FF14 and has fun playing games. Then he reads one WoW thread and gets tilted AF. Also, try getting Asmongold as a guest on a Tank Talk podcast. It needs more Bald.

Xeno is second to Asmon as a react andy, and we love it.

Xeno: oh he said "doing this again" so they did this before Preach: actually they done this plenty of times

My 3 months wow experience : Frustration, bad story, people leaving groups, people bashing me when I fail something, people insulting each others, just a shitshow 80% of the time. Some good experiences too, but it was REALLY rare. My 3 months FFXIV experience : Joy, amazing story, people trying their best to improve after a wipe (sometimes sitting for 5min to elaborate strats), people saying stuff like "That's okay, shit happens :)" when I fail something, then doing /dance and /pet emotes at the end of the duty, NOBODY EVER LEAVES a group even when it's hard. I litteraly had 0, and I mean it, 0 bad experience with anybody. I also met people, we founded an FC and I'm meeting them next month even if we're not in the same country, because they are THAT nice. This is just night and day, no shit every content creator is switching to FF right now.

Holy shit, thing is talkin about at the end - I remember him making video MONTHS before release and saying exactly same stuff: choosing a covenant doesn't make sense from neither lore nor gameplay, because you are slaving for these covenants all the way from lvl 50 to lvl 60 playing MSQ, enjoying their take, and then you are forced to pick one and only one out of four. They are not at war with each other, they are not having disagreements - they are cogs in a machine, each content with their own, but you still somehow are expected to champion only one of four. And then WQs unlock, and you still fucking interact with each covenant, no matter what you picked. This choice was so fucked up from every point, and it took them A YEAR to cave in and say "yeah, sure, here. you can swap freely now". And fucking Ion still can't admit he is a tool.

@xenosys What you said at 1:18:50 is literally the problem with every fucking expansion since Legion onwards. They literally could have had 5-6 years of expansions that were fucking amazing. I guarantee you if they listened to people like Max, Preach, Asmon.... and like 100 other content creators about obvious issues about the last 3 expansions, there is no fucking way you would have these WoW goliaths playing FF14 right now. Because WoW would have been really fucking good this whole time. You're spot on when you said that they thought they were fine with screwing over Cutting Edge raiders. But they ended up fucking over literally everyone, and the more you play, the more you're fucked over. Which is the most stupid fucking thing ever.

I'd just like to point out that the thread on the forums that wanted covenants changed had over 13000 posts in it, now obviously not all of them were in favor of changing it but the majority were and it took them until 9.1.5 to actually change it and it's still not ideal because the progression is still split between the 4 covenants it's just easier to switch now.

it is genuinely sad to see someone so passionate and have so much love for that game rage this hard because he wants it to be better. hopefully WoW can be better

Reason PTR doesn’t works is they don’t have an internal testing team anymore and use the ptr solely on top of not respecting players issues

I want more xeno's reactions to other people's rants :3

Personally I hate that the harassment lawsuit happened when it did. Gives them a scapegoat. "We didn't fail from a game-dev perspective; we were just canceled for being human garbage!"

yall remember that twich council they where trying to put together last year? ppl started getting called out (some for good reason), but once you give that much power/access to a few ppl they will get focused on by the general public. This is definitely a scape goat situation.

Those people don't feel like gamers, they seem like people you'd meet at a department store or something.

Oh man this was good take, so funny about hour in "I am really invested in this." lol

Honestly you got it exactly right with a specific line - "WoW got really confident". Yes. They were on top for so long that they got lazy. They were never challenged. And they thought they could just coast from now on. Nope.

Thank you for posting this on RU-vid Mr. Strummer

I watched this live on Xeno's stream and I was malding, I am pretty much a WOW Refugee, jumped to FF14 on June. I was pretty casual on wow but trying to provide a bettter team to my friends and get some M+ progress the game presented itself with random ass barriers at every point that made it unfun, I didn't want to be a fire mage, but if I'm Arcane then I get shit blasted. My main character is a Ret Paladin, and when the Exp came out I wanna choose the night fae covenant cause I liked the aestetic and story, but get stuck with arguably the worst spell from the covenants for pally, I felt just bad in comparison, even a guild member blasted me for it at one point. The Horde vs Alliance shit should just cease to be, many friends in the past didn't enjoy the game bc they were forced to play a race they didn't want to because we play horde, but they wanted to play Alliance, segmentating the playerbase in today's time just shows a bit of an outdated mindset. I'll keep it like this but I'm ultra glad I made the jump to 14, I'm super satisfied with what the game provides and I'm happily spending in the store everyonce in a while because I feel respected and the shit is good quality, $7 for a fucking toast emote is a bit pricey but I dont care, I feel happy with the product. Love the stream and the contect Xeems, hapily subbed to it

54:35 Ion is essentially an automaton, so this makes sense.

I love how happy he gets when he see the FF notifications.

Gotta say, as someone who's played wow for almost half my life watching the game that you once loved die a slow and painful death at the hands of parasites who don't care is agony, I havnt even played in years but it still hurts to see the game I loved at one point burn despite the fact I f3ankly havnt had fun with the game since wotlk

How good a game is doesn't correlate with inclusivity in any way, yet there's multiple paragraphs dedicated to that. The only thing that should matter in the hiring prcess is wether the person is good for the job. This goes both ways obviously, but apparently Blizzard and most other big companies struggle to not be racist and sexist despite virtue signaling constantly.

bruh you can see the blizzard devs reading the script off the screen lmao... shows how much they care about this whole community council

Ion is 100% Scuff MacKenzie.

These WoW creators look so unhappy when they step back into WoW for a minute after experiencing FF. It's like watching a friend suddenly realize they've been in a toxic relationship for years and didn't see it.

As for Alliance and Horde - yes, there is zero reason to keep this up. If you want to keep Open-world PVP, that can be done through factions like Aldor and Scryer, to which the player CHOOSES to join and can swap between, albeit with some difficulty. Lore-wise it long since stopped making any sense. Gameplay-wise too, there's just not a single reason why gameplay would suffer for anyone. It would actually be a big win. PVP battlegrounds could be faster, with players being picked from the same pool. Raids and guild management would be easier with more recruits around. Open-world PVP would not suffer if you let the players to self-balance the two PVP factions on the server by providing incentives for the disadvantaged side. Server economy would be much healthier. No reason at all.

Tooo much background music but nice beard and content man, keep up the good work :D

"final fantasy literally changed my life" a lot of people underestimate what those words really mean. and I bet devs who hear that about something they made is really satisfying. just seeing it as a fellow player makes me happy

I think what preach said mostly applies to MMORPGs. There are a lot of RPGs that don't let you respec. I sorta get what they mean with "weighty decision", and it can sorta work in a single-player or co-op setting. Or maybe an experimental new type of MMORPG with systems and balancing built around it even. But not in something like wow, where there very quickly will be a meta of whats the choice to take when you are X or Y, and not taking that choice is just sabotaging yourself for no good reason.

Make getting through the Story Mandatory. I started Playing in Legion. What happened was, I would get to an area, over level, and move on, then go back in my spare time if I liked the story in that area. I found the story interesting,, but I had to rely on my RL friends who were in the game before me to understand what was going on fully... If I didn't have that,, I would have been lost trying to figure out why certain things were happening.. If they just took a page from FF14 at all, make a story course that takes you through every zone, and make it mandatory to get through.

Is there gonna be a video of xeems reading the comments to the previous video?

All us WoW players love the Gold Saucer because it's pointless. It isn't mandatory, it has no character power tied to it, you get nothing functional from it, it's all just for fun. And that's the exact opposite of anything we've gotten from Blizzard in a very long time.

First time viewer and I can't stop looking at that magnificent beard. World of Warcraft was my first MMO back in 2007 and I played it religiously for a decade, seeing how badly Blizzard has shit the bed is heartbreaking.

Hearing Preach talk about how Ion said that the player base is acting entitled really made me understand how far from reality the devs are. Imagine 5 years ago you come home with straight A's on your report card. Then 5 years later it's straight F's. Naturally, your parents would be pissed. Now imagine saying to them: "WTF, I don't need to listen to your bitching. You are acting entitled." That's what WoW is like. Wrath was straight A's for Blizzard, and Shadowlands is straight F's. We're not entitled. We just know that you have it in you to do better. Blizzard, you just refuse to do your homework.

I mentioned this in another video too, but I believe that WoW will not be improving anytime soon until all of the higher-ups that make decisions are replaced. Ion and his ilk do not have the capacity to listen to criticism and feedback, and WoW suffers for it. I love WoW, played for many years, but I don't think it will ever return to its glory days. I've moved on to FFXIV, I hope others can as well. Maybe a large monetary loss is what's needed to make WoW better; at least, I hope that will make WoW better.

"There is no company in the world, who's giving themselves a bad product to fix later intentionally, instead of just making a good product to making it better" - meanwhile @ Dice with Battlefield: "Hold my beer"

Makes me appreciate yoshi p even more

they should just add a raid and nothing else. In 9.1 they tried to add "content" and ended up with korthia, a parody of an update to "the maw" which itself is a parody of Bozja.

49:03 I've literally have had this happen to me in FFXIV. I've also had White Mages who RPed as earth mages and would only cast stone...

this remind me when bellular has lil breakdown and shaking on his podcast xD

The thing about leaving mythic+ keys is, that it is just a "bad" thing in the 9-13 range, where people do it for loot. If you do 15-16 keys that were advertised as "weekly" in the partyfinder, nobody leaves. I've dragged people through +15s, that were less helpful than people that would pay me for it and those are basically afk in the back. Above +15 it does not give any better loot, only score, which does not matter besides bigger number, better person. If you clearly see that a key is not timeable anymore, somebody will write something along the lines of "done?" and the group will reply with y, or + and just disbands. When I was pushing a bit higher, there were barely ever keys completed over time, you just disband and find a new group. If you just do the dungeon for score and not loot there is exactly 0 reason to complete a not timeable dungeon (unless you want a different dungeon), so are you really toxic if it's just a waste of time for you, especially if others underperform? Also about toxic players, typically

Back in the old days (started playing in 04) they had gms that would get shit done. Blizzard has just a few gms now after firing them all, they don't do shit anyways except tell you to go to WoWHead. That council is a pr stunt, that interview was full of bs and pointing fingers to someone else.

Blizzard PTR is basically free early access for the world first raiders to work out strategies for bosses ahead of time.

Regarding m+ it would be super simple to fix the mentality. The key is the problem. Because it degrades if you fail the timer. People treat the key as their new born baby. If some1 makes it go down you hate them with all the fiber in your body. The keystone should just be a drop down menu when you start the key with a list of the levels you have compleated and 1 higher. So if you fail a 18 because some1 leave you can make a new group and go for a 18. Now you need to first time a 17 then get a random 18 key. So learning a specific dungeon on a specific level is rly hard to make work. And yeah people leaving before last boss just because the time runs out so they wont grt score when people in the group needs gear from the run is rly toxic. M+ should not drop gear from the dungeon. Only weekly cache

Blizzard has never listened to feedback, as player feedback is never in line with their vision of the game. You see this constantly in their class/systems balancing methodology throughout each expansion's beta, as they are more interested in collecting live data for their spreadsheets and tweak bit and pieces here and there, than actually looking at feedback. The "am I out of touch" meme is ridiculously accurate in this case, they're not wrong - it's the player's fault for not playing the game how Blizzard envisioned it.

I want to see Xeno react to Hartvigens review of FF14 because of one particular part

Now they only have to please the people in the community council and not the playerbase as a whole.

this video even an second time wathcing makes me mad damn blizz god damn blizz

I don't know if Xeno manages this channel or if his editor does but does anyone know why Xeno doesn't save any of his past broadcasts? I'm in a different time zone so I can't catch his streams live so I tried looking for his vods but he doesn't have any recent past broadcasts. Do I have to subscribe to twitch to see the past broadcasts or does he just not save them? Thanks.

Preach it Xenos! no pun intended.

37:31 that... that's a very nice way of talking in wow. jfc, it feels so wierd learning people are thinking THAT is bannable!

I love the meetings with yoshi lul

Tying player power too covenants is mind boggling, such things are fine in single player rpgs as it doesn't necessarily matter as it's all about your experience. But in an MMO, people that want to be optimal usually want to be optimal for their guildmates so they don't feel bad the others are doing everything they can and you won't. Not only that some people compete for spots and stuff. Madness.

37:52 "That's expected", fucking killed me, even though it's actually sad :D

I gotta admit the poof poof scene for the limited quest stuff, I was taken a back. I was like "damn they did this". But what I loved the most is when I realised there's a proximity emote with the girls. If you're far away they just sit around and talk to each other and just hang out, and it's only when you get close that they focus on you and start doing sexy poses. The fact the developers put time in to making this distinction means they approached this with humour and good intentions.

This is heavy Inception stuff.

I think the big problem with Blizzard’s design philosophy now is that they seem primarily data driven. And they found that by limiting systems essentially, introducing FOMO, it ups the “engagement” of players, at least in the short term, because you’ve forced them to interact with systems they don’t like to actually do the things they do like. And that works in the short term. I remember seeing this same thing happen in Destiny 2. You see this same approach in other Blizzard teams like the Hearthstone team. It’s all strictly data driven. Engagement numbers. The problem with that is that that’s not a good long term plan. You’re basically abusing the player base to ride that hamster wheel. And yeah, when they first introduced that in Destiny 2, engagement numbers were higher than ever. I saw a ton of people logging in. But eventually the player catches on and ultimately they feel like they’re being abused by the game. By the game devs. That’s why it’s so common to see reactions like Preach, he’s not the only WoW player that has had on stream near breakdowns like this. And I’m not blaming him or trying to make fun of him. What I see is seriously the classic behavior of an abuse victim. Being abused and gaslit on top of it for years. After a while you just say enough is enough and that’s why there’s a mass exodus of streamers and players. That’s why the purely data driven approach doesn’t work. That’s why the meme, “Do they even play their own game?” Is more than a meme. It’s really a question, “What’s driving your design decisions?” Because what it SHOULD be is the actual human player experience. And you can only get that from actually, seriously playing your own game in a serious, non-casual way. You have to design from the top down while always being aware of the bottom casual players. Not from the bottom up and completely disregard the top because they’re numerically a smaller portion of the database. The sad thing is Blizzard isn’t even doing THAT. Because that requires to still look at your player base as actual players, human beings. Now all they see is data driven analytics and numbers and trying to chase that unsustainable goal of increasing “engagement numbers” month over month, even if you’re abusing your player base to get that.

I started playing WoW in Beta. 17 years I have been playing, and honestly I feel a little lost. I stopped playing a few months back and I am waiting for change.

Jesus… all the game devs shown during the community council in 5:00 and foward, they have that expression that says… “ I’m dead inside”.

I love how he has the FFXIV client running in the background.

I said this on the actual video (Preach is great, love his content). When he said "I want Y'shtola back", you know blizz burned that bridge, salted the Earth and drank his beer. You get that sense with a lot of the wow content creators who are branching out now. They've been in a bad relationship and they didn't feel like they had a way out. It just took a couple people saying "hey try this game its really good", shadowlands being complete shit, and the harassment to break that.

how many adds Xenos? - Yes

I left wow years ago for destiny 2, but just recently started ff14, and im in love! Its everything wow could have been

He’s not talking about bugs. He’s talking about bad systems. The biggest problem is the loss of talent. The people who made WoW the most popular mmo are long gone.

Wow can't believe I won the House giveaway!

I love this game. I'm not even very good at this game. I miss it being fun, addictive even. It's so sad. So much wasted potential. "It's kind of overwhelming that a company [we all want to so bad to be so good] can be so stupid [15:50]" :(

32:15 its not even about the bugs. Its the horrible systems and game imbalance that comes from those systems. Devs just dont listen, which is what's annoying/concerning about this council thing.

Can you post ur reaction to Pyros enrage?

* sets clock after YoshiP's roadmap *

The ogre's name is Cho'gall.

I think the thing that is doubly insulting about the WoW community council is that this is the thing you *pay developers to already find out and know.*

Well they declined Asmon which is the most famous WoW influencer sooooo yea lol

It’s a guaranteed that blizz will make people write post for them

If you havent yet, you should check out Asmon's video about his application to the community council. Its hilarious!

It’s over guys. Let go. Take with you the memories.

I didn't know Kratos was a youtuber lemme just subscribe

"I cannot imagine what it would be like to be unhappy with a game you've been playing for such a long time." Welcome to League of Legends.

Conduit energy didn't effect most people because they aren't respec'ing often enough. The problem is Conduits are another gear/talent tree. The problem is actual good quest content is locked behind the "rpg" choice I'm forced to make. It doesn't even make since lore wise since all covenants like the players.

"How does FFXIV release cleaner content without a PTR than WoW does with a PTR?" Project Management, basically.

Always funny to hear Blizzard talk about encouraging diversity and cracking down on toxicity when half their execs and productions teams have been scandaled by sexual harassment, sexual assault, stalking and even death threat charges and scandals