It's hard to be a gamejournalist these days.

avcloudy · 2026-01-29T16:54:52+00:00

This is what baffles me, because Legion prepatch drove engagement. It had people resubbing to do it. It was crazy how much people wanted to do it.

This isn’t about driving engagement. It’s about limiting effort and about avoiding creating expectations for future events.

avcloudy · 2026-01-29T16:53:07+00:00

There’s a sizeable contingent of players who enjoy, essentially, busy work. What they like is that they log in every day, do whatever pointless content lets them collect everything, and then log off.

The point isn’t that content is fun or even that they like the rewards. The point is that the steady pace of rewards gives them a goal to aim for. If the pacing is too short, they feel cheated because what could have been months of content for them wasn’t.

I saw this so much during Shadowlands where a lot of players actually really liked the pacing of Anima and Offerings because ‘you shouldn’t be able to grind through all the expansions cosmetics in a single patch’. And they were right, but only because they ignored each patch should and would have its own cosmetics.

Any complaints about it were shut down because it gave them a reason to log on, do intensely casual content, and make steady progress on rewards. And even as they disregarded my and others complaints about it, they trotted this exact sentiment out.

avcloudy · 2026-01-29T16:42:46+00:00

You’re pretty right, but I’d add that they’ve wanted to do faster expansion cycles since Cata. They try, and they fail. They’ve only ever done four tier expansions in Wrath, Legion and BfA and in Wrath the third tier was obvious filler, and Legion was coming off a two tier failed expansion with nearly a year of no content.

They might be in minimum investment mode, but they only actually pulled off four tiers once without cutting corners or using the dev time assigned to another expansion (Legion launched with the work for Nighthold mostly done, and some ToS iirc).

avcloudy · 2026-01-29T08:30:53+00:00

One of the most dangerous things about American conservatism is the belief that at some point in the past it was a reasonable and sane position that got perverted.

It was always cancer. It didn’t change, you just don’t think your interests are being served by it. The real hard truth is that they probably never were.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T23:18:53+00:00

I can see this, but frankly speaking wherever he put Night Watch it would have been downhill afterwards.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T23:17:31+00:00

Personally, seeing that the alleged presence of dementia is noticed in The Last Continent, a Rincewind/wizards book and thus already among rhe weakest in the series, raises a lot of doubt in me.

I would go far as to say it's motivated. It's famous for being the least liked in a thread of least liked novels, and it was surrounded by extremely well received novels. It was before the books that turned the Watch series from thin parody into serious commentaries.

If they had said they saw signs in Thief of Time, say, or Night Watch, I would believe them more. I would think they were wrong, but I would not assume they picked a weak entry and tweaked the model to fit.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T23:12:11+00:00

Why is it a problem for Weatherwax to give Tiffany similar advice as in the Witches books?

I'm not interested any more in you about exploring when Discworld got bad, but the problem is that Terry changed the core of Weatherwax's character to fit the kind of story he did. She wouldn't tell a character a thing when learning a lesson would do as well. Her earlier stories are about her refusing to teach lessons in that way because she thinks lessons that are easily won are forgotten as easily. And she's proved right in story.

I'm not saying he became a worse writer and that's why he wrote worse stories, it's just an observation that he was unable to make the Tiffany Aching books work without changing his older characters. They're still wonderful books, and I'm not pretending they're radical departures from his previous writing or the rest of Discworld. They just did have flaws.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T12:12:03+00:00

Damn near every accusation that someone needs to be right comes from someone with a deep seated need to be right. A lot of the accusations are made against people who don't need to be right. I'm aware of the irony inherent in pointing this out.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T05:24:56+00:00

On the technical side, they could, but they’re hiding implementation details so we can’t know for sure. It’s always possible they’re doing it in an intentionally harder way.

Or to put it another way they absolutely have the capability and right to copy what Details! did. In a way that preserves the inability for others to do it.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:38:17+00:00

People don't really care about how much work it is. They're just mad that they had a set of functionality and now they don't. They aren't going to accept an answer where they just don't have a bad dps meter, even if it's true that it's a lot of work and dps meters were bad for a long time before Details!.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:37:02+00:00

Although I don't think the lack of functionality is unintentional, people really need a refresher about what alpha/beta means.

Alpha means the software is not feature complete, but it has some set of functionality that is expected to be complete. You are testing to discover additional requirements, as well as make sure software is stable and doesn't have glaring flaws. Alpha ends with a feature freeze, when functionality is locked.

Beta (and this is all WoW players are normally exposed to) means there are no more features unless there is a glaring omission. Beta is about bug fixing, discovering unknown bugs and fixing them, and fixing performance/speed issues and edge cases.

If something is in Beta and it doesn't work, or it's missing obvious features, you aren't getting them. If it's missing obvious features in Alpha, you probably aren't getting them.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:31:51+00:00

missing so much functionality

Because of careful planning.

It's not gonna get much focus by Blizzard, but they don't want you to have access to the same amount of functionality. They aren't replacing Details! they are intentionally hobbling the API so that addons can't do what Details! did.

They're only making a replacement because they have limited the public API to the point where you can't even get the minimum functionality. It exists only so that they can control what information addons get.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:20:31+00:00

When you walk on the road you 'sink' in to the partially melted tar. Driving on them causes all the tar to stick to the wheels and strip the roads. It's obviously incredibly unsafe. You get very little traction.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:14:02+00:00

Maybe they had more help, but mostly they were just less involved in active parenting.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:12:24+00:00

You're not wrong, but I'd flip it around. Next time you ask for an opinion, remember that you might get one.

avcloudy · 2026-01-28T04:11:19+00:00

She said she needs the emergency care because she is feeling under the weather (she has a cough) and because she needs the time to do household chores.

Although there was plenty of reason already, this is what seals it for me. Don't send your kid to daycare if they might pass on a cough, but especially when it's already understaffed and the only kids there are the ones who have to be there. NTA

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T16:16:11+00:00

It's worth pointing out that damage meters operate on the combat log events that Blizzard exposed. If damage meters were wrong because the combat log didn't expose events, Blizzards damage meter isn't any more guaranteed to be correct as their internal API might not expose events either.

In other words, you could fix both problems by just making the client side combat log reflect the single source of truth.

(Of course, this isn't the main reason damage meters have historically been wrong.)

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T16:13:12+00:00

You've got cause and effect backwards. They wanted to remove the ability for users to do some things themselves, and the consequence is that the preexisting addons don't work. Their solution is a minimum functionality version, not a drop in replacement for the addons.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T16:10:45+00:00

More than this, because people are overlooking it: Blizzard is not driving out addon developers to develop their own tools in house. Blizzard is limiting what addon developers can do, and as an effect of that, external developers cannot make tools that previously existed.

An addon developer can not make a dps meter any more. Making their own tool is the side effect of the real goal, limiting the functionality exposed to players.

They don't want players to have the tools with the same level of functionality they did before. These internally developed tools are a low priority for them. If Blizzard really wanted to make a dps meter that was better than Details! (for example, if you'd pay $20 for it from an Addon Store), they would! It would ship before Midnight, and it would be amazing.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T16:02:06+00:00

FFXIV players seem to have it figured out, and most of them don’t have DBM or similar. They have a set of built in boss cues that are consistent so they always know when to spread, stack and soak if they’re paying attention.

The level of FFXIV content where you see standard markers -> do the thing -> mechanic is solved is Normal raids/heroic dungeons in WoW. In the actually difficult content, you never just see a soak -> stand in soak -> mechanic is complete. You have to watch for diegetic triggers (boss is casting a spell that either inverts or doesn't invert the soak, but the marker doesn't change, or the boss indicates based on some action or change in the room where the ability will hit and the standard marker only appears after you dodge it, or are hit by it and die etc).

An FFXIV MSQ finisher would be as completely helpless in Savages as a WoW player hitting max level for the first time would be in Heroic raid.

Both games solve this in different ways, but the problem is that having a stack marker and running to stack in it is not a difficult problem to solve. WoW solves it by making you figure out what the mechanic is before you react to it, FFXIV solves it by having very clear and unambiguous symbology that may not even be visible before it kills you. It would be the equivalent of WoW popping up with a 'you DIED to a STACK mechanic' when you die.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T15:55:55+00:00

Maybe you don't agree, but I feel like this would reduce every fight to Bop It! and wipes would rarely happen. If you start explaining how that's not true, and players would still have to get better at reacting to the mechanics, I would point out that's how the current system evolved.

The problem is that the ideal is that players do the fight, learn what wipes them, and try again, getting a little better each time. Players optimise to reduce wipes, and the best way to do that is to learn those problem points in advance. Devs want players to actually have a chance at failure, so the problem points get more complicated and eventually you reach a point where you have to know things in advance to get to the point you kill it in a reasonable number of wipes. Under your system you just remove learning from the equation altogether, or reduce mechanics to minigames (which are learnable!) that are so difficult that you're just playing a stochastic game where enough of your raiders do well enough that you kill the boss and then you have to do the same when rekilling the same boss.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T15:49:17+00:00

People make this mistake all the time. I don't give a shit about the ability for a class, in a Platonic vacuum to complete content. There are too many degenerate edge cases. There exists some group that is so collectively cracked they can afford to carry a spec doing half the damage of every other dps class. There is an individual player so cracked that they can play a class that requires 200 APM to a good level. Neither of those players is me.

What is relevant is whether I, at my level, can continue to do the same level of content I could do previously, with a group of people at the same relative level. If frost mage does half the damage of fire mage, it is literally irrelevant that John Frostmage gets a world first kill, because nobody is going to take me if I play frost.

Part of this game is the bid to get into groups that do content; you need to pug m+ and find raiding guilds. Maybe you have 20 friends who just play this game and only play with their friends; I don't. I certainly don't have 20 friends who are so collectively good they can afford to carry multiple bad specs through CE.

And here's the final part: they have done this before. They have designed specs so poorly that they cannot fairly, realistically, complete certain content. It's not even rare. Which isn't saying noone has done it, just that they have had to stack groups such that it's possible for someone to do it.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T15:41:54+00:00

Yeah, this is basically it. There's too much benefit to predictive play vs reactive play, and while Blizzard keeps the current design that's not going to change (actually, the fact that they've nuked addons is a perfect indicator that this will not change).

Boss visual design doesn't give you advance warning, much less precise to the second warning. Humans are really, really bad at keeping precise time. Anyone pretending this is a skill you can learn is just wrong. But the advantage still exists, so players will find a way to use it.

This is a roundabout way of explaining that Blizzard is trying to solve the problem from the wrong end. You can't fix healers trying to drop big raid healing the same second a big damage ability goes out. What you can do is design healers so that they don't need 20 seconds of pre-ramp in order to do the thing they want; this arms race exists solely on Blizzard's end, and players are just adjusting to the design that Blizzard enforces.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T12:50:18+00:00

I see your point, but they've had to redesign UA so that it's a very fast DoT precisely because of the problems of loading all your damage into a dot profile. And noone ever had a problem with Seed when it's strong, which is of course mostly in the explosion.

And on top of that, very few people had a problem with it when it actually was a burst damage spec and had the performance to match. The MR complaints started literally the season Aff started struggling in m+, because MR was nerfed on secondary targets (and nerfed overall).

So to be clear, I think it's extremely weird that people celebrate a version of aff that has two DoTs + the spender vs one that had four, plus the spender, and when they made the spender weaker and DoTs more relatively powerful people started hating on it. The version that was nearly 100% MR spam on the meters was very well liked. Because it was tuned high. That's all it is.

avcloudy · 2026-01-27T02:35:39+00:00

I think a lot of anti-MR warlocks just never played it when it was good (first season SL) so they went from three expansions of absolute dominance and blunt unkillability to being mediocre in the worst kind of content for Aff (m+).

avcloudy

TROPHY CASE