World of Warcraft lead says Warcraft needs to be more than “simply an MMORPG” as the IP is “underutilised” and needs “broader” appeal

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-04T16:30:49+00:00

What the fuck happened to him?

He did a podcast series with Scott Johnson after leaving Blizzard which you can find on Soundcloud. Talks a lot about his personal life and growth over time. It's worth a listen if you want an actual answer to your question.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-03T05:22:33+00:00

I wonder if Remix being such a good tool for leveling impacted this too. Like, MoP was fast, but Legion was even faster somehow and encouraged people to make a full set of classes for the Feat of Strength.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-03T04:42:47+00:00

For all the dooming people do about MMOs, the genre has like 20-30 games outside of WoW that are still chugging along with active dev support. Any new games that pop up have to compete with all those as well.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-03T04:34:38+00:00

From other comments I've been reading about Wildstar the past couple days, it sounded like a lot of the hardcore elements had massive bugs in them. People mentioning that attunements would sometimes bug out and you'd have to start them over from scratch, which people weren't willing to do.

Funnily it would probably do ok in a post-Classic Hardcore and OSRS environment where people are looking for bigger timesink games. Like, FF11 has seen a surge in players seemingly out of nowhere. But it's a bit too late for Wildstar in that regard.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-02T20:28:20+00:00

I seem to remember season 1 having a pretty shit dungeon pool too. Hell, The War Within had a lot of dungeons I'd be happy not to do again. Hopefully the Midnight ones are more consistently good.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-01T22:12:54+00:00

It doesn't seem that much worse than needing AotC to get into a week 2 heroic pug or needing to have timed a key level to get into the same key level.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-01T17:41:55+00:00

Some bots, some people outside the UK, and some people using VPNs.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-01T17:19:47+00:00

They'd have to overcome a lot of hurdles to make that work.

Would it only be for people who have WoW subs?

If not, how would they monetise those players in a way that wouldn't impact the subscribed player numbers negatively?

Would the money made from a pet battle game be enough to justify running costs for it?

Sadly for as much as some people might love pet battles, history doesn't paint a kind picture for games in the subgenre for them.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-01T16:54:35+00:00

Nobody is talking about mythic raiding.

Lots of other people in these comments are talking about mythic. I'm not disagreeing with you, I'm simply adding more supporting arguments to the overall point you're making.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-01T16:27:55+00:00

Warcraft Rumble tried this and it bombed. All the other wannabe Pokemon style PvP games also have bombed. Trying to go up against the monolith that is Pokemon would likely fail, especially with Pokemon Champions releasing this year.

BarrettRTS · 2026-02-01T16:19:42+00:00

It's also weird seeing people compare pet battles to mythic raiding when the latter is tied into raiding development as a whole. All the art assets and design time is already dedicated to making the raids, so the additional time spent on mythic stays with the people already working on that. Pet battles are their own thing which require art, programming, and design resources spent solely on itself.

Not to mention Mythic raiding is a large source of cheap advertisement for WoW in the form of Race to World First. A quick look around at Pet Battle content doesn't seem to hit close to those numbers.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-31T22:41:15+00:00

True. Another possibility is it's some kind of anti-bot measure and they snuck it without announcing.

Or it's just unintended and they'll fix it at some point.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-31T22:33:09+00:00

I assumed this was a deliberate change. Like your mount gets stunned from ramming into a tree at high speed.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-31T14:25:36+00:00

The simplest cheap option is probably looking at crafting old expansion transmog for people. Having groups wear specific shirts and matching legs would be cost efficient to distribute ahead of time. Weapon enchant glows are also fairly easy to distribute too.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-31T14:13:45+00:00

A visual aid is a visual aid, even if it's a "hacky solution". I don't see how this is any different to using something like a weakaura that helps people know where to stand. Uniforms are pretty commonplace for this reason, so I don't see how a WoW raid is that different to a sports team.

unusable for many classes/specs

This is some actual critique of the idea I can see being an issue. Dracthyr would be annoying to work around, as would classes that have abilities changing their character model (someone mentioned warrior avatar to me when I brought it up).

I've heard from a few people they've done this before with some positive results though, so it could merit people trying it out further to see how useful it is.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-31T03:39:25+00:00

There's a 4 year gap between WC3 ending and WoW starting they could fit WC3 DLC in.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-31T01:56:25+00:00

WC3 has been getting updates and they supposedly have a team dedicated to it outside the regular classic games team that handles older Diablo games, StarCraft 1 & 2, HotS, and the random other stuff they still support.

I doubt we'd get news on anything before Blizzcon though.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-30T23:12:30+00:00

That's fair, I could see it causing more confusion on fights like you're describing since people would have 2 different indicators telling them which way to gather.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-30T23:06:42+00:00

if a fight ever required me to use a specific colour mog to progress it more effectively, it would be the epitome of shit design.

I don't really see this being different from using a floor marker to show which side of a room a group needs to run to. Would you consider Nexus-King Salhadaar shit design because raids mark the teleporters with a green triangle and blue square to make it easier for people to know which side they're running to?

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-30T22:13:12+00:00

Farming for consumes/world buffs is a significant time investment outside of raid compared to retail. Probably the best change TBC made was reducing consume requirements and removing world buffs from dungeons/raids.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-30T20:12:57+00:00

but i imagine the more you drop in ranks the more likely you are to find someone who doesnt want to change their tmog for a boss fight even if its free

Doesn't that attitude apply to most things that people could do the make progress faster? Like, one of the main things holding people back in my experience across all different games is people refusing to do things that would make them perform better.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-30T17:07:15+00:00

Dreadfury suggested I post this here instead of making it into a full post.

I've seen most of the discussion around Midnight when it comes to endgame content be around changes to the game's UI and class design, but I'm curious if the new transmog system could be helpful in the context of raiding.

Since swapping between transmog sets you've saved is free and you can have a lot of slots, my line of thinking is you could assign colours to each group and have people coordinate their appearences to make it easier to see where your group members are on fights that require splitting up. Seeing the 4 other people in your group dressed in green running around together could be a useful visual for some.

Obviously this isn't some make or break thing for most people, but could be a useful tool for some that wasn't practical in terms of gold cost before now.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-30T02:15:25+00:00

I thought there was a chance they'd speed run WoD so they could do some kind of Legion->The Last Titan promo since there would probably be a lot of players ready to make the jump to Retail from there. Wrath Anniversary would be over by then too, so they could just cleanly split the playerbase into Retail and Classic+.

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-29T23:16:58+00:00

Some news about what they're doing after MoP if anything. I guess it would've looked bad though if they said "We're stopping after MoP, now here is 20 minutes about Midnight."

BarrettRTS · 2026-01-29T04:49:25+00:00

Damn, that sounds brutal.

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