I guess Blizzcon is 90% Diablo content now.

Two bits of interesting news.  Mike Morhaine is stepping down from Blizzard leadership.  No reason given, but after 27 years of doing something, I’d be tired of it too.  I consider Mike part of the old guard, like the doctors from BioWare.  More passionate about the games than the market.  Instead of oozing charm, he was full of geek.  I thought that resonated well.

J. Allen Brack is promoted to his position.  I didn’t do much digging, but there’s an interesting video with J. Allen, Ion, and Tom.  I just think their personalities are really quite focused in this particular video.  As a people watcher, I find this quite entertaining.  Not from what they are saying, but how they are saying it.

Azerite Changes

Somewhat large changes afoot.

• More drops:  You’ll eventually get up to 370 Azerite gear from world quests.  A quite inelegant solution to the problem, but it certainly fixes it.
• More traits: A new outer ring on some gear in 8.1.  I don’t understand this one, personally.  It seems like it makes the situation worse, not better.  The problem now is that there are too many traits, without interesting choices.
• Trait tuning: To make things more interesting.  Without actual examples, this feels more like number tuning.

By adding more traits, that’s further diluting the pool of available gear.  By adding Azerite gear drops to WQs, it goes completely against the design choice to target azerite gear drops for their specific traits.  WQ rewards are entirely random.  Combined, this appears to be making the problem worse.  Practical examples will help straighten this out.

Interesting vs Meaningful

This post as a base.  It’s a decent summary of the Azerite issues, with no potential solutions.  Which is smart in a sense, since people will focus on the problem, rather than the solution.  Lore responded.  One particular item:

The point about traits being “useless and uninteresting” is interesting considering that you also make the point of “every gear change requires simming.” These two points are kind of at odds with each other. The way to solve the simming issue would be to make the traits more simplistic in nature. Similarly, making traits with more outside-the-box designs leads to more complicated questions of “is this better or not,” which in turn encourages more simming. Either way, it’s an interesting challenge, and one we’re taking to mind as we move forward with traits in future updates.

Useful things are not always interesting.  A toilet is useful, but it is far from interesting.  A Ferrari is interesting, but far from useful.  A robot that vacuums the floor is both useful and interesting.  They are not binary, or in conflict.  It’s like saying something is red and big.  They are simply descriptors.

Azerite traits are generally uninteresting, because they have no impact on gameplay.  No matter the trait you have, the buttons you press stay the same, 99% of the time.  They are generally useful since they do apply a +damage/healing effect.  Some are much less useful than others (getting +haste on my Brewmaster feels bad man).

Azerite was meant to replace artifacts, tier sets, and legendary items.  All 3 of them had interesting impacts to gameplay.  So much so, that the majority of Shaman Ele changes in 8.1 are cut and paste from that model.

That the set of traits are so poorly worded that they require simming is a different point altogether.  Passive damage boosts require simming, and it’s actually practical to do so.  An interesting trait that changes your rotation… that’s something much harder to sim and compare.  It’s also a whole pile much harder to balance.  Pretty much why they were always restricted in the past.

I do get what is trying to be achieved here.  Simplification is every IT person’s goal.  It’s extremely hard to do.  I don’t quite understand what the changes above will actually do to fix that issue.  At least they are trying.

There’s a point where this becomes petty/funny/sad.

The item on the left is a normal drop.  The item on the right is a Warforged version, which should be an upgrade but is in fact worse that a Normal BfA dungeon drop.

The items for sale on the Timewalking Vendor have not had their ilvl updated, but do need a 120 player.

These are item specific – not related to how the stat squish has impacted the overall balance.  End Times can’t seem to be completed right now, for example, as Sylvanas will 1 shot most tanks.

All of this was corrected in a hotfix on the 25th.

Timewalking is something that comes up every few months.  It opens old dungeons from a previous expansion, and applies scaling so that max level players can go back into them.  Completing these dungeons awards drops as well as tokens.  Those tokens can be exchanged for items that were previously on-part with heroic dungeons, or cosmetic gear, or heirlooms, or mounts.

It’s a neat side activity. This is the way most dungeons work in FF14, so it’s not like the tech is new or hard to do.  Blizz has done this a few times in the past.  An entirely different topic as to why this system is always available…

Bug Hunting

IT has bugs.  That’s life.  Some are obvious, some are not.  Some are easy to fix, some are not.  Fixing them is one conversation that I don’t think I need to get into.  This is about finding them.

The 3 examples put above would have been obvious from a single dungeon run, through every Timewalking dungeon.  Guaranteed, 100% reproduction.  That these were pushed into production means that either a) it was not tested or b) it was tested and the project manager accepted the test results.

If this happened in my team, this would merit disciplinary action.  After 3 times, they would either be dismissed or re-assigned to other work.

Reality

It’s a game.  It’s made to be relaxing for some, challenging for others, fair for all.  It’s just symptomatic of BfA in general.  Which is sad – and not what we should expect from Blizzard.  I should be focusing on the fun items, not these brain fart items that keep popping up.  I’m missing the polish.

And I can only fathom how Blizzard employees are feeling about this.  These items deflate overall confidence… and it takes a long time to build that back up.  It also causes finger pointing, and niche work.  No good ever comes from that.  Again, in most industry the lead of these teams gets replaced so that it at least appears something is being done to rectify the situation.

I’ve completed the Horde storyline for BfA.  It is quite well done, and I’d argue that it’s a better one that the Alliance version.  Mainly because it operates under a branch model, while the Alliance is a Root model.  Let’s explain this a bit.

A branch story starts from a given point and then expands to multiple lines that develop the plot and characters.  There’s a large arc, but each zone has it’s own flavor.  It’s the most common type of story, and it allows you to see the various pieces in play at almost any given time.

A root story goes the other way.  It’s a bunch of different pieces that eventually meet up in the end.  Most crime fighting novels go this route (Holmes & Poirot are very good examples).  Things do not seem at all connected until, poof, there you go.  It takes a really good writer to pull this off. Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series is a really good example.  Lost (the TV show) is an example of how that can go off the rails.  A very solid plan is required to make this work, so that the reader doesn’t feel cheated.  They can go back, look at the bits and come to the same conclusion.  (e.g. watching Memento is fun the 2nd time).

So that leaves the Horde with an expansion story, with tons of troll lore and very few Horde bits.  The Loa, Blood Trolls, and G’Huun main arcs all work well against each other, and it’s honestly a lot of fun to dig into those zones.  Mechanically there are only so many blood trolls you can kill before moving on.  And there’s next to no interactions with Sylvanas that I’ve seen so far.  Both good since the Troll storyline is really awesome, but also bad, since this entire war started because of her.

The Alliance instead gets 3 near completely distinct storylines that never truly intersect past the Drust King Gorak Thul events on the War Campaign to find Jaina.  The events in Stormsong really don’t have much impact at all on the main line.. but it does set up the Old Gods.  Drustvar… sure, a bit.  Tiragarde is golden.

Capital Cities

Ziggurats are cool to look at.  They are less cool to explore.  The Alliance “center” is relatively small and easily traversable.  Sure, there are memes about the rope ladder on the boat, and a stupidly placed fence, but it still is easy to move around.

Horde need to take a flight path from their main center of operations to their boat.  A flight path.  And then jump down and run 3x as far as any Alliance player would need to move.  It is a beautiful city that is a major pain to move around in.  So I guess like a real city?

Other Isle

I think the Alliance get the better deal here in terms of movement on the other isle and placement of activities.  Both start off with 3 spots near the coasts, and after hitting the proper reputation level, can unlock more inland flight points.  It’s that the Alliance islands have WQ that are placed more inland, or at least over much more difficult terrain than the Horde islands.  Stormsong is quite bad in terms of initial Horde bases and where the WQ spawn, with Tiragarde not too far behind.  Drustvar has nearly everything in the top left (even as Alliance I won’t do the dark forest items).

Vol’dun is passable as it’s pretty flat (cept the north).  Nazmir has most activities in the North East.  Zuldazaar is ok, if you avoid any quest in the middle of the map.  There’s a lot of vertical to do if you do end up trying.

Uldum

I normally play Stormrage, which is 95% Alliance and just massive in terms of overall players (> 900,000).  I made a Horde Demon Hunter on Uldum, where the split is closer, but there are still only 50,000 Horde players.

(Side note.  Demon Hunter from 100-110 was Legion Invasions for 1.5 levels in 15 minutes of effort.  110-120 was with Azeroth Auto-Pilot to get me to the next main quest and some optional ones.  Still read the text and cut-scenes, which was good.  No dungeons or Island Expeditions.  It was painful until 111, when I had a full set of BfA green gear.  When I dinged 120, I had 26,000g and had yet to use the Auction House once.)

Three noticeable impacts of Uldum

• The Auction House is much slower.  Prices are higher, but many items just won’t sell.
• No guild invite spam!  I get one every 2 minutes on Stormrage.  Saw 1 total on Uldum.
• The world feels empty.  I’d have 6-7 groups running for World Quests, now there are times when I don’t see any.  When I do meet people, it’s nice to see a split between factions.  Stormrage… I’d see one Horde per day, from another server.

I like to look at all sides during a debate.  Rarely is someone ever 100% correct.

WoW Tokens.  The interesting mechanic that Blizz put in place a long while ago so that people in need of gold could buy it with real money.  Sure, it helped get rid of a lot of the black market gold (not all, but most) but it also served as an interesting measuring stick for the game.

On US servers tokens were around 215,000g in the early summer.  It has been at that level for most of Legion.  Good enough.

When BfA launched, it took a massive nosedive.  Down to  a low of 100,000g.  That lasted exactly one month to the patch cycle.  It is now moving back up, currently at 140,000g.

Which is interesting on many fronts.

I have a passion for numbers, and even more so for the context behind those numbers.

BfA Launch

Prices on items dip for one sole reason – supply outstrips demand.  There were more people fishing for gold than there were people who wanted to buy tokens for time.  Which makes sense, since expansions typically have a spike in players and they are not necessarily buying tokens to get time.

I sold a staff for just 800,000g within a few days of launch.  Money was flying all over the place.  It was relatively easy for people to swap their gold stores for a month token at launch.  There’s a pile of analytics to be seen on this.

Interestingly, the price has started to spike on the 1 month anniversary of BfA.  Why?  Quite a few reasons I’m sure. My bet is that people have stopped buying tokens for cash, meaning that the supply is drying up, in addition to less people actually buying tokens.  I’d wager that people are figuring that with LFG/Warfronts out, they really don’t have any need for gold now.

It’s still quite early to see what this actually entails, we’ll need to see at the 2 month date.

Fishing for Cash

Blizzard is offering the Dreadwake mount for free for anyone that buys 180 days (6 months) of game time.  Offered the day after the livestream of 8.1, and at the 1 month mark.  It does look neat, and it’s not a horse.

Cynicism active. This reminds me a lot of the 1 year sub offer in Cataclysm that offered guaranteed access to MoP beta and Diablo 3.  That is not a good mental link.