What do you think is the cheapest way to avoid criticism that you cater to minorities only as a developer? The answer is simple: Just declare every gamestyle in your game minority content, and act, as if there was no content thats actually played by any kind of majority.
Ion Hazzikostas, Assistant Game Director of World of Warcraft, recently talked about exactly that.
He talks about every kind of playstyle in World of Warcraft being minority content. Be it pet battles, be it battlegrounds, be it raids or even mythic raids for small minorities..
In special Ion Hazzikostas always was one of those developers, that adressed raids and in special competetive gameplay and challenges, being a mythic raider himself. His topics in interviews are fairly biased, as he shortly talks about anything else than raids just to continue to talk about mythic raid balance.. which surely isnt something most of his players adresses.
The wish to be able to cater to minority content is, therefore, mainly based on his own idea about what games should be about, obviously. And, obviously, his idea to act as if every content would just only adress minorities, is wrong.
LFR as example, based on statistics from MMO-C derived from Armory data (Blizzards own database), was being played by 71% of the players, which surely would make LFR majority gameplay.
Questing also is gameplay being played by a large amount of players, even at endgame.
Dungeons, quoting Hazzikostas, also is a majority gamestyle.
Furthermore, Hazzikostas argues that many players play special components and see it as a nuisance, where i would like to ask Mr. Hazzikostas if any actual gameplay in a computer game should feel like one? Shouldnt it be his job to actually create gameplay thats not just annoying but also highly replayable?
If i take LFR as example, a lot of players actually play LFR as their final endgame. So its not just a nuisance, but actually their endgame. Still blizzard handles the most successful implementation of raiding like a nuisance, in special when its about investing effort to make LFR more playable.
As crazy Mr. Hazzikostas idea is that every playstyle only adresses minorities, and as much this myth is easily to be debunked, as more he justifies the focus on special minority components, as like mythic raiding or high end PVP, by using this argumentation.
Currently, the only intrinsic reward for LFR is the story. Nothing else. Blizzard could change that, and make LFR actually a fun component. As LFR needs the most attention. As there is many negative feedback about LFR and its playability.
Recently, and even before, the devs nerfed every single extrinsic reward from LFR, while listening to the rant of a few. I believe the devs could invest way more effort based on viewing figures. And sorry, organized raiding never adressed many.
Does that mean organized raids should receive no love? No.. but the devs could base their effort on the size of the audience it adresses.
Watcher wrote, that the majority plays dungeons.. and still the devs prefer to design raids over dungeons. No new dungeons in patches .. What if that design paradigm was changed, and the focus was put on dungeons and questing, and not on raids anymore?
At the end, there is also the question why the game is that massively raid centric, if the devs would like to invest the same effort in different playstyles?
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