Another open Letter to Mike Morhaime and Mr. Kern

For some reason, every wannabe seems to be interested to write letters to Mr. Morhaime. No matter if he actually knows the guy, or even not. As i am a wannabe myself, i also would like to write a letter to Mike Morhaime, but due to respect i will not call him by his first name, but act as if i didnt really know him at all (which i really dont) and call him Mr. Morhaime.

Dear Mr. Morhaime,

recently, a group of players that run a pirated version of World of Warcraft obviously catched your attention. Obviously, you are going to listen to these people, that built a realm for nostalgic players who want to play classic WoW. Obviously, you want to build classic or pristine realms yourself and catch the hyped players with either hiring the nostalrius admins or buying their voice for PR.

The truth is, that many of your players actually do not hate what WoW developed into. The truth is, that people are fine with a focus on a broad audience for World of Warcraft. You will never hear any single complaint from those who play the game just for having fun.

The classic nostalgists actually are a small minority and not “the community”. Yes, they managed to hype the forums, but actually all they want is to deevolute the game. To turn back time just to return to the very first time when they played world of warcraft. When you actually take a closer look onto the audience of Nostalrius, many of that people played the free version just for the fact it was free, not for the fact it was a classic version of WoW.

To turn back time, to question everything you developed in the last years, isnt the right solution to the problem to integrate those players. The right solution would be to turn WoW into a free to play game with microtransactions, as people are mainly blocked by the monthly sub. If you take a look on how subs develop in World of Warcraft, many people return to an expac, play for one or two months, and will quit again. You actually only gain the money for the expac, and two months of playtime.

With a free to play model, you would adress way more players, as free to play is way more fair. Also, you could sell expacs for way more money if you removed the subs or added a plan for free to play. Also, you would adress anyone who played on a free legacy realm. Additionally, the higher costs would give you more money when players already quit in the first month.

I dont think you should adress the classic nostalgists, as they just want to remove everything blizzard added to the game. You should continue to design games for as many players as possible, and not focus on a small minority, as you tend to do in World of Warcraft (as example, your devs favor organized gameplay, while there are millions playing matchmade content). Your game will be way more successfull, if you focus on those million of players, who are happy about what WoW evolved to.

Pristine realms will only catch the attention of the classic players for a very short time, and only then if they really are classic realms. You will not gain the attention of them, if its just a free-of-convenience version of the actual content, instead those people will just go to whine even more about the fact you dont cater to their special interest needs. If you open this pandoras box, you will be doomed to listen to the small destructive minority that likes an old incarnation of the game over your actual development, while innovation should be a way more interesting part of your development process.

Thanks for reading, Mr. Morhaime. Or even not.

My first impression of Legion.

Blizzard told us, everything will be different with Legion. But are they going to stick to that promise? In special, if we just had to experience the reimplementation of Garrisons without a lot of changes implemented into the system?

Well, my impression is that Legion is going to add a lot new labels to old ideas. And that many components just link to existing traditional content as like Quests, Raids and Dungeons once again. Infact, blizzard adds a lot of breadcrumb links to their garrison table.

World quests just seem to be the same as the known event regions from WoD, just with a new name, and better extrinsic rewards. Also, i would not wonder if they reuse the quest content from the levelup experience. Infact, the world quests send you to existent assets to do generic quest content which gives good extrinsic rewards, while the level of intrinsic rewards still has to be experienced.

The PVP remake with honor as a skill tree just means to take away the best PVP gear from matchmade players, as the gear is being moved to strongboxes, and the best gear only drops from organized gameplay. The difference from gear will be as big as nowadays once engaged raiders have played the third tier and fight against new level 110 character with 100 item levels below. As i dont think that blizzard is going to change the ilvl inflation, there is no defacto change to protect the pvp players wish to be competetive in PVP without the need to gear up. Additionally, PVE gear will become nearly as powerful as dedicated PVP gear. Additionally, you wont be able to fill epic gaps with PVP anymore, which will take away a lot of incentive to play PVP from the majority of the players that tend to play both PVP and PVE with a focus on PVE.

The artefact weapon just is a traditional talent tree, whichs leveling is extremely time consuming and replaces the legendary quest line.

The class quests are no new idea, but just quests based on the class story, while it is not known yet if blizzard is going to extend it beyond the initial story told. In WoD, blizzard did not continue to add meaningful  content to anything else than grind regions and raids, so i believe they will do the same in Legion.

Dungeon challenge modes are being made for organized groups only, and will therefore never be more successfull than normal raids. Also, the idea to keep them challenging gives blizzard card blanche to not add new dungeons throughout the expac anymore, as they didnt do since MoP. At the end, the implementation of this system is just about development effort reduction, as like nearly every single system change in the last three expacs.

Blizzard focuses, again, on developer convenience, and not on player wishes in their new expac. They give existent content new labels, instead of actually adding new content for the game components they wish to introduce for endgame. Blizzard still will put their main effort into raids in the upcoming patches, which will be the only component to receive a massive amount of new assets and  boss mechanics, while the open world will be the same gameplay as we already played in WoD, just with new great sounding labels like “World quests” and “mythic+ dungeons”.