I’ve trawled through the gripefest to discover whats been pissing people off this week and boy, do we have some good-uns.

 

So this thread appeared and despite laughing at the title, I felt compelled to check it out to see if there was any new and creative way this OP was slating ol’ Azzy’s Palace.
I wasn’t wrong!

The crux of the issue for the OP was that the grinding of world quests was getting tedious and despite the pretty surroundings, it was giving nothing to the story-line apart from allowing Azshra to pop up shouting “dance, puppet, dance” while threatening to drown us. Which I totally get. The world quests of ‘kill 15 murlocs’ or ‘collect 5 starfish’ seem to be completely pointless ways of keeping you busy doing nothing while we settle in for the two week wait for the raid to open. Here’s hoping that the raid will give us more dialogue to see what all those fucking starfish were actually used for…

However, it being a forum post and all, there were plenty of people to chime in with their own concerns about the game.

There was the obvious issue with the Jaina portal business. Many were commenting that the idea had no logic behind it, there was too little time to make it believable, or both.
For the ‘logic-ers’ it was trying to reconcile that Azshara had stopped Jaina teleporting with her ‘magic ban’ but then two seconds later, Jaina is opening a portal to Boralus already. Even with the Heart of Azeroth workings understood. It just seems that, in all reality,  Azshara would have known about these ley-lines already. Surely she would sense Jaina tapping into them and, lets not forget, she can see us. she knows when we have been leaving via this ‘illegal’ portal. So its not as secret as we’re told it is, or Jaina is just being not very smart about the whole thing? Arrogance maybe?
For the ‘quick-ers’ they just feel that it is the portal equivalent to ‘and then everybody clapped’.

The bully told us we were banned from getting out.

So we used the ley-lines that were flowing to the bullies palace to get out anyway.

and when we got back home, everyone clapped.

For them it just didn’t take Jaina long to do this. They know that shes a force to be reckoned with but, its the fact that she has a plan b ready, two seconds after Azshara tells the group that you’re trapped. Jaina was shocked that she couldn’t teleport, yet she knows how to open a portal that in normal circumstances would be blocked too.
And she does it almost instantly. There’s no ‘let me have some time to find out how we can get around this’, there was no sense of ‘well fuck, were trapped’ which kinda ruined the story-line and their faith in the way the zone is going to play out.

And I get both of these points. Yes, only you can get through the portal because you are holding the Heart of Azeroth but the fact that it was so simple and effortless to do just kinda defeats the purpose of being banned from portaling in the first place.
It could have been told better, if Azshara had said nothing and it was just Jaina who discovered that she couldn’t do it and needed to find out why and how to get round it. This could have then given more risk to our predicament in Nazjatar and the fact that she actually needs your help to open a portal shows that we are in a bad place (I’m a hunter, what the fuck do I know about making portals???) For other Mages they could have incorporated the class specific dialogue that they have used for other classes in the past when faced with a task (remember DK’s and that Red Dragon in Drustvar?) that shows that at least the Mages are going to be more capable at aiding a portal opening. Or even if they left the Azshara/Jaina dialogue as it is but just added in that she needed time to work something out, then fine, I would get that too.
Anyway, I like the idea that only we can get out, but, it was just too quickly implemented.

There was also the issue of the architecture. Yes, it is pretty with the coral and barnacles, bio-luminescent starfish and seaweed… but is it what we were expecting when Azshara told us “Welcome to Nazjatar” in her smug voice?
While it’s not until today that mere mortals will be able to step foot into the actual Palace, it’s fair to say that people were expecting more flamboyance from the Naga style underwater.
On land they seem to have this shanty town of tents or they have remodelled the old Elf architecture to add in some Naga worship. So why haven’t they gone above and beyond in their actual city? The Elves they came from were known for being snooty and self obsessed, image over everything yet they have ratchet purple tents set up in crevices or they are slinking around on giant disk platforms… Azshara even pops out eggs in a musty old cave… There’s not much going in the way of splendour that we were led to believe there would be in the great Naga capital city.
The term ‘Azsuna that didn’t make the cut’ comes to mind unfortunately for the city.
Needless to say, the actual scenery was praised. And I’ve already got some screenshots up of it. It is great and the attention to detail as you run down pathways is amazing.
It’s just the hype didn’t match the housing in this case.

 

---

I don’t think a day goes by when there isn’t a million posts about pathfinder.

Now, one of these had quite a good point, one which was also voiced by BellularGaming yesterday surprisingly enough.

The issue of what the fuck your character is. Gatekeeping flying by patch release. and how these two come together to be an absolute clusterfuck.

So the standard thread of ‘this is bollocks’ came and went. Yet while the OP was throwing their Elekk Plushies out of the pram, it was the people replying who saved some dignity for the whole post.

Well, kinda. There was a bit of begging going on but I digress…

The point is, there seems to be some disconnect with what our characters are being depicted as in the plot lines to what we are depicted as in quests and what we are depicted as in cinematic cut scenes.
Which then ties in to the disconnect between the henchman we are portrayed as yet lower ranking npc’s can fly when we can’t… and it takes us nearly a year to get it due to patch gatekeeping.

There was some complaining about the rep grind and how it was getting boring, mostly due to it being tied to needed to do repetitive world quests daily rather than having the opportunity to don a tabard and go ravage some bosses as well as the option to do WQ.
But, the biggest thing that got people riled was that the gaining of rep itself was gated.
It was pointed out that it is heading on the the best part of a year and we’re only now actually being given the chance to fly. Talia could fly as soon as we got to Boralus, our new bodyguards that we meet in Nazjatar can fly… but we, the great champions of our faction, the great emissaries of our faction to the new allies couldn’t fly at max level.

This is kinda where the issue on who the fuck we even are gets tied in.
Bliz have made a big deal of making us, the greatest thing since sliced bread to our factions. With what we have to do, we are more valuable than the faction leader at this point. Yet, there are millions of us. We have a narrative that kinda doesn’t make sense for an MMO and then we don’t get treated the same way by the devs with regards to in game abilities.
Tbh, I’m more annoyed about flying gatekeeping than I was about portals being removed. I missed an entire week because I was working and my hours were not forgiving. I’m now massively behind because I couldn’t do my second job of doing the dailies every single god damn day.
It also puts me in a pickle now as those that have had the time to religiously put in the hours to do them every day are now flying and making it more difficult for me to complete the dailies. Take the rares one. People fly over, kill it, while I’m still running.
Some might argue that it was the same thing in Pandaria, the last time that we have flying unlocked at max level in exchange for gold. But in Pandaria, the stuff that flying helped with was not detrimental to others. Unless you class flying around the oppositions shrine as detrimental… but, anyway. Flying didn’t make it harder for other level 90’s to do things. And I think that’s half the point.
Combine that with the dialogue we have been fed for the past two expansions, where we have been raised to the position of demi-god, it just doesn’t seem to make sense that we can level to 120 in a matter of days but it takes us nearly a year and apparently the permission from randomers to be able to fly in these places.
Maybe if there was a reason given to us as to why we can’t fly here that then works into why you need to be a certain rep level with people we don’t even meet until the release of the penultimate raid… That might go some way to making the gatekeeping a little sweeter to swallow. As it stands though, I’m having to stand with the forums on this one. It’s pointless and only seems to be the petulant compromise between unlocking at max level and getting rid of it altogether.

 

---

Ok, this is quite an old one that I pulled from the vaults but I think it serves a good discussion point.

So the virtual store decided to have a clear out and reduced the price of what they termed the ‘retiring range’ and in some cases, put them together in bundles. If you had one part of a bundle, say a mount, you could get the two pets at the price that the bundle would have been if the mount wasn’t in it etc… Anyway, things were cheap.

The issue was that despite claiming that these things were retiring so if you want them you better get them now, it seems as if Blizzard are following Fortnite down the “get it before it’s gone, but it will be back, maybe, at some point” hole.

Now the store has always been an extra revenue source for Blizzard and a divide between people who hate it for keeping unique mounts behind real money and those who love it and are happy to pay real money for a unique mount. This time however, it seems that the issue is the above small print. Specifically that these three mounts, handful of pets and the helm transmogs are going away but they could be brought back, meaning the money that you laid down to get the bundle before they are taken off the store is actually just Blizz generating money through panic.

There was also confusion as to why a digital store needs to retire anything at all. It’s not as if they have retired the oldest ones as the Celestial Steed is still there. Yes, they do take up space in terms of data when purchasing but they are not as company cash draining as keeping physical items in a warehouse when they don’t sell.
Are they going to release more? So they need to make room? The digital store isn’t exactly overflowing with choice, so people were pretty confused as to why these ones that needed to be taken down right before the holidays in a way that drove people to purchase them due to FOMO.

To balance the  have to remember that the marketing decisions are made well in advance, so this could have been planned well before BfA even launched. Even so, the whole fiasco with the Dreadwake mount and game time bundle doesn’t alleviate any suspicion, especially since they have release another mount-game time bundle.

With the Dreadwake, we were told that it could be ours when buying a six month subscription and those who wanted the mount but couldn’t afford to drop the money for six months in one go would have to wait as it would be released seperately some time in 2019.

On the 19th of September 2018 you could buy the bundle but on the 23rd of April 2019 you could buy the mount as a stand alone. Seven months had passed and it was out. Not even waiting a year since it was first available. Granted, it’s individual release date could have been scheduled adhoc depending on the popularity of it to ensure that people didn’t forget about it and not purchase it when it was released stand alone. Which, if you had ended up dropping six months game time in one go on it because you weren’t sure when you might have been able to get it, it gives you an idea of the marketing tactic used for the ‘retired’ bundle and a somewhat sour taste in the mouth.

Yet. they didn’t use the term “retired” they used the term “hibernation” this in itself implies that those items are going to come back once they have had an extended sleep in the vaults.
Possibly when the current players had forgotten that they were a thing and they could bring them out again and get a bit more hype from the people who had never seen them before. But shit, that’s retail for you. Everyone does it…

The problem of people wanting all these unique mounts in game were also brought up. Why should subs just get reskins when the cool mounts are avaliable, just put them in game.
But if you think about it as a retail business then it might make a bit more sense.

You go to buy something that costs £9.99.
You see someone next to you with the same item as you and an additional item that costs £20.00.
You cant expect to have that £20.00 item as well just because you are spending £9.99…

With making the shop appear in game I think did haze the boundary from their retail buisness side and their game side which has kinda led to people getting pissed off with the mount and pet store but I’m afraid I’m going to have to cool hard logic you out of the park with this one.
You want something extra, you have to pay for it.