The Daily Grind: When do you get the feeling the developers just aren't trying?

@davidarmstrong488

Did anyone else read this as "I want more pointless shit, not actual content, and for goldsinks to be done away with so I can buy everything with little/no effort"?

@Dril

I guess it depends on your view point. Most of his requests make sense for quality of life improvements. Adding these features would show players that Blizzard looks at everything when it comes to improving the game. While I won't Blizzard never improves QoL features, it always appears at the bottom of the list.

As far as cost of things, they did lower the price of Cold weather flying. however Epic Flying and Master Flying are still 5000 gold. Master flying I can understand being 5000 gold, but Epic should of really been dropped down to 2500 to scale it better like they did with they rest of the riding skills.

As a side note from what I remember from reading Cata Beta, they did intended to add a feature allowing players to make themselves appear different than they were equipped. as I recall however their was player lash back from the PvP community who insisted this would be broken as it would allow higher geared players to hide their gear making it harder to sort out the harder opponents. I always found this absurd though as I use Class and HP total to get an idea of where the person I am fighting stands gear wise.

@davidarmstrong488

Er, cold weather flying is about 400 now.

@Dril I actually agree with some of his points. You should be careful how you word your posts, what is pointless shit to you might be an essential immersion feature for another.

Going back to WoW as an example. We have gotten some new mechanics and better story presentation along the years. We have gotten the usual new dungeons and raids. The graphics and animations on everything else have gotten somewhat better but for the character models.

All the older races, especially the original ones, need a revamp desperately. The meshes are horrible for this day and age, the internal skeleton and animations need a complete fix. have you pay attention at how the animate? Clipping and broken polygons all over the place.

And the armors. I would love to actually see them, rather than have them painted onto my toon. I want to see the relics I am using on my character. I want real capes too, not the square polygon attached to my back. If they are good enough how come Varian and Arthas won't be caught dead in them? They should let us loot their capes when we defeat them. :p

I can understand if the look of the game is not important to you as it is to me. However you cannot deny the game would be the better for it. Taking into account it has been six long years since they have done anything, it is about time they start doing more than talk about it.

@davidarmstrong488

God you made me recover my password to post about this constant whine.

GREEN FIRE OMG WHY DON'T I HAZ IT

Blizzard, because they are smarter than the stupid warlocks that whine about this, color coded most spells.

Green - Nature
Yellow - Holy
Bue - Frost
Purple - Shadow
RED - FIRE

It is the same across all classes. It is so someone can see a spell's graphics and instantly know what it is, or have a pretty good idea. i.e. green glowy hands, probably a resto druid, yellow glowy hands, priest/paladin.

Basically you want to break a system that has been in place since the beginning of the game just so "MAH SPELLZ LOOK COOL YO"

@vosk187

Except that ever since Burning Crusade was released, or even before that, FIRE THAT WAS GREEN was always associated with demons or the Nether. Shadowmoon Valley, anyone?

@vosk187
so all the green fire in shadowmoon Vally is nature fire?
both warlocks and mages got fire spells so your point is mute
people can tell druid from other classes easily

@alzeer

Whether you agree with it or not, its why blizzard does it. Secondly its for PVP, not PVE, I don't think there are any mobs in Shadowmoon Valley queue'ing for arena. -.-

@davidarmstrong488

Clearly you love to spout nonsense.
Cold weather flying, at its highest, was 1000 gold, an easily obtainable number.
It has since been made much cheaper.

"Warlock green fire" is something they've addressed before - the way the game is coded makes it extremely difficult. Is this something really worth their time?
Actually, they've addressed pretty much all of your issues before...

@davidarmstrong488

Agreed. There would be so many simple ways for more diversity and fun. I am quite surprised they haven't tried any of them.

And yes, the screenshot speaks volumnes. While the new old world Cata content is cool, going back to Outland is now a chore. MMOs still have way too many kill X of Y without any effort to interwind it with some cool story or fancy going on.

@davidarmstrong488

I really agree with the cosmetic options. Like the recent Lunar festival... for the achievement you have to buy the lunar finery... but then what do I do with it? Theres literally no reason for me to keep it if I can't wear it in other situations. In LOTRO, I could cosmetically equip it and go about my way. WoW needs to do this as I'm really tired of why, at level 45, I'm strong enough to take down demons and save towns, but look like I couldn't dress myself in the morning? Really?

Besides that, I have also come across multiple things the developers just forgot about... tooltips showing original file names, or tooltips like the one above, blue checkered boxes where ground items should be, flight paths marked on the map where there is no flight path or other NPCs around, entire areas void of all life. Really, what the heck? Not to mention, for being a "cataclysm", most of the zones feel exactly the same as they did. I thought the entire world would change, that zones would be obliterated, and other zones completely changed. I'm going now through Western Plaguelands... and its pretty much the same, after having gone through STV, which is pretty much the same... c'mon... not even a real graphics bump?

@Dril Did you even participate in any of the recent Lotro events? If you did, you wouldn't said something like that.

If you are a min/max player who wants nothing but increased level cap, then sorry, LotRO is not the game for you.

@milkpudding

That's great, but I still can't level my alts in nice, reworked zones that don't make me grind my teeth at having to, yet again, walk across half the zone to continue a chain.

I don't like holiday events and short-term, temporary content; which is basically what you just said LOTRO has added. Enedwaith was nice, but it's just another zone; rather than tumbling about with random class revamps and then giving up for another year before they decide to try again, I'd rather Turbine focus on one thing and give actual, meaningful, long-term changes.

@Deadalon
You can tell that Blizzard is dedicating their resources to Titan and (hopefully) Diablo 3. The decisions of the team revamping WoW for Cataclysm have been poor. Between the end of October and the beginning of December, they managed to alienate me from my healers and tanks (and I won't even mention the problems with hunters) -- I'm not interested in PUGging with new, unforgiving mechanics and I don't think most other tanks are either.

I think the emphasis on the raiding game (and less than 1% of the game population that takes advantage of it) hurt the rest of the game in ways that will be evident by the time Activision releases the Q2 2011 financial results. It's been said before that the only ones who can kill Warcraft will be Blizzard themselves.

@xyna031

My Mage is doing fine in Cat; one of the things they got right.

It's the healing that has been "borked as intended" that seems to be the big issue. Though that's not to do with laziness, rather misguided developer hubris.