Time To Dip Into Those Sports Analogies

"Franchise [Joe Burrow] says he is tried of that 'why not us' ****. It is us! We are these ****ers right now!! Let's ****ing go!! We're winning the whole ****ing thing!!"
--C.J. Uzomah, after the Bengals won a playoff game for the first time in 30 years

 

Blizzard could have been channeling C.J. for all I know.

If I squint, I can pretend that these didn't exist:

Cataclysm
Mists of Pandaria
Warlords of Draenor
Legion
Battle for Azeroth
Shadowlands

That works, right? That's how Blizz wanted us to pretend things are in Retail, right? That the previous expacs didn't exist, and we can skip right to the current expac?

Because I'm far more interested in Dragonflight than I ever was for all of those expansions listed above. 

Okay, that's not quite true, because I was hyped for Cataclysm until it actually dropped, and then I found out after a playthrough that I didn't like what Blizz actually did with the reworking of the Old World. But that's all old story now*, and Dragonflight seems to have a lot of potential.

 

Or, as we Bengals fans like to say before football season starts, we're "cautiously optimistic".**

***

But first, I wanted to talk about tone.

As I'd said in comments over on Kaylriene's and Bhagpuss' blogs, I was shocked to see Blizzard actually eating some humble pie for a change. Maybe the events surrounding Battle for Azeroth and their "traditional" response during the corresponding Shadowlands release blowing up in their faces had something to do with it, but you never know for sure.  I certainly did not expect a (relatively) contrite tone, particularly given that their community council is filled with hardcore raiders, the group that they basically pander to 24x7. If Blizzard had doubled down on what they did in Shadowlands because the hardcore scene wasn't that affected by "events", nobody would have been surprised. 

Well, call me surprised.

 

The tone expressed by the WoW team at the release was rather subdued compared to over the top stuff from reveals at BlizzCon, which was good, but it was also somewhat contrite, which was shocking. The presenters admitted --kinda sorta-- that things hadn't been going well and they'd made steps to fix them, and they're moving forward with more long term fixes. Multiple people have commented on the lack of any mention of borrowed power, but since that entire trend came --and apparently went-- without my ever playing the game at that time, I'm not missing anything.

The trailer at reveal was also notable in that there wasn't a peep of any of the following:

• The end of the world coming
• Any Big Bad
• Horde/Alliance conflict

Again, there was drama --it is a Blizzard trailer, after all-- but it was a subdued sort of drama. I got the impression that hey, the world has been crazy and we had to help it, but now we want to come back home. To fix things. To explore and build. All of which the game desperately needs, because this endless cycle of war will eventually end with nobody winning. Look at human history, and the worst of wars that were fought left wide swaths of land totally depopulated, and the victors themselves were weakened to the point where they were conquered a few generations later. That is the endgame that awaits Azeroth if the cycle isn't broken.  

As far as decor goes, the room has more
of a gamer's hidey hole feel than some
corporate office space, like what you see
in the front of Blizzard's offices.***
Oh, and "Go Team Red!!" --Redbeard
(This is a screen cap from the Reveal Livestream.)

 

I do have to wonder whether Holly Longdale's presence has helped to mitigate the Blizzard attitude a bit. She is enthusiastic, but as Wilhelm Arcturus put it so well on Bhagpuss's post, she presents it in the same vein of someone who actually plays and enjoys a variety of parts of the game, not just the raiding aspect. Too frequently we've seen parts of an expac where devs gush about how beautiful it is, and then.... Okay, onto the raiding part! 

Yeah, like this.

 

But I felt that Holly helped to keep interest on parts that have very little directly to do with raiding, such as crafting. "Can I wear a chef's hat?" she asked at one point****, helping to direct conversation to the fun RPG elements in the crafting overhaul.

To be fair, RPG elements have been kind of overlooked in Retail --not by players, mind you, as any perusal of Kamalia's blog will show you-- but by Blizzard itself. In their need to keep people "engaged" by "dailies, rep grinds, and gating!" any RPG elements have had to be provided by the players themselves. This time, it feels like Blizz finally got the message that not everybody is truly interested in raiding, and Holly was helping to direct conversation that way.

***

But it has to be said that WoW no longer being the Top Dog in MMOs probably had something to do with all of these changes. 

I asked in guild chat --and Kaylriene on his blog-- about whether FF XIV's influence could be felt in the wholesale UI changes and crafting overhaul. My guildies who play both games felt that FF XIV was more in line with the crafting overhaul, like the aforementioned Chef's Hat being something that they felt was straight out of FF XIV. The UI, they felt, was Blizz adopting aspects of the ElvUI addon, while others felt it was closer to GW2. (My opinion was that it did feel closer to GW2, but there were SWTOR elements in there as well.)

Other parts of the expac --the new playable race of Draconians Dragonborn Dracthyr, for one-- had me kind of shrugging a bit. It was controversial enough when Dragonborn became a playable race for D&D 4e, so seeing it here in Dragonflight is kind of an "okay, I've seen this already" thing. The single class dedicated to the Drakthyr is very unlike Blizzard, however, and graphically I felt they captured the hybrid fairly well. I'm sure that there are plenty of people who wouldn't care for the Drakthyr's looks, but to be fair I dislike the 'pandering' look of the Pandaren, so to each their own. I'm just glad they didn't create an actual dragon class that shape shifts into humans/elves/whatever, which if it were to be true to WoW's NPC dragons, would be hugely overpowered from the get go.# After all, you never see drakes or whelps shape shifting, only the adult dragons.

***

And yes, Wrath Classic was officially announced to drop in 2022, which doesn't shock me at all.

 

My expectation is that since Sunwell is now in the PTR, Wrath will likely drop in an August/September timeframe. It just feels way too fast to give enough people a real shot at downing everything, particularly since WoW Classic had close to two years to work with, and TBC Classic will probably get only 15 months in operation. Holly notwithstanding, this is being driven by the hardcore top guilds alone, not by the majority of the playerbase, which is going to bite the Classic team in the ass.

Additionally, since the Classic team announced that there will be no automated LFG tool, there's going to be Trouble in River City. There's a huge imbalance between the large pop servers and the smaller pop servers, and simply giving free transfers to the large pop servers isn't going to cut it. It's bad enough trying to get some farming in on the lower pop servers that I can't imagine what it's like on Pagle or Atiesh, which are 5+ times the size of Myzrael. "Something will have to be done about the lower pop servers," several guildies commented. I personally think mergers are the answer, but the two largest US servers are almost totally Horde or totally Alliance, and that's a problem that can't be handwaved away by mergers or free transfers. It might take account/user creation bans on the highest pop servers combined with server merges of the lowest pop servers to get guilds to move off and spread out, but it's just a guess on my part. After all, FF XIV had new users/accounts banned on a lot of their server equivalents because of the influx of new people --I know, because I tried to make a toon on my son's FF XIV server and couldn't do it-- and Blizzard might have to go that route too.

***

It's a long way between now and Dragonflight's release --Wrath Classic will come much sooner--  but I have to admit I'm, well, interested in what's going to happen now in Retail. Like I said, it's been a long long time since I looked forward to a Retail expansion, so this is unfamiliar territory to me. Blizzard has plenty of opportunity to screw this up, so my years of wandering in the wilderness as a Bengals fan has prepared me for this eventuality. Hopefully they won't let me down one too many times, like baseball's Cincinnati Reds have##, and turn me against Retail for good.

*Or, in another way of putting it, "It's not that deep, bro." Oh, I am so owning this line now, and no, not for snarky reasons. It's because I need the constant reminder without being hit over the head with a clue stick.

**Until last year, the preseason --and our corresponding cautious optimism-- would be the high point of every season. Now, after the surprise success of last year, I'm kind of adrift; this must be what it was like for Leicester City fans the year after they won the Premier League back in 2016, only we didn't actually win the Super Bowl.

***For the record, it's this:

Pretty standard office park stuff out front.
Orcs notwithstanding.
From Wikipedia.

****The answer is "yes", btw.

#A quick aside that while I appreciate being able to play as a High Elf in LOTRO, from a lore standpoint anybody playing a Noldor --the only High Elves who returned to Middle-earth in pursuit of Morgoth were Noldor-- would be drastically overpowered from the get-go. Standing Stone kind of hand waved that away by having your character be in suspended animation for centuries after the days of the Last Alliance, but come on. They'd have been better off choosing to allow you to play a Gray Elf --a Sindar-- rather than a High Elf.

##When the son of the team's owner gets on television for an interview and basically says to all those who saw the ownership sell off a ton of good players during the offseason that basically [paraphrasing] "Who cares what you think? Who else are you gonna cheer for?" you can bet your ass that people are calling for the owner to sell the team. 

 

EtA: Corrected a couple of grammar issues.