What was Blizzard's Biggest Mistake ?

[Nachtwulf]

There's lots of niggling irritations (Female worgen eyes not glowing, and the permasnarl, and the INFERNAL SNORFLING, making spore bats and nether rays useless...) but honestly not too many things I consider a mistake.

Things I genuinely dislike though...

RealID. Won't use it. Have it disabled through parental controls so they can't even get me through friend of a friend of a friend. Don't want it. Take your stinky RL out of my virtual world, kthx. Do not want. I don't have Facebook, I don't want to use it, and I CERTAINLY don't want to be forced to utilize it to play my game.

Stupid plot written by Knaack. Just... all of it.

Complicated = Fun. Complicated is not fun. Complicated is stressful, unnecessary, and infuriating. If I have to make a choice between moving out of fire or playing Hardmode DDR on my buttons in order to not come in at the bottom of the dps list, something is wrong.

PvP. Yup. I went there. I don't like PvP and have never been shy about saying so. But I know others do and that's fine, but I cannot TELL YOU how many times something valid, extremely useful, and not OP at all in the least has been broken beyond repair (or removed entirely) because someone somewhere in the PvP community found a way to game the system and do something Blizzard didn't expect. (I suppose the reverse is occasionally true, but not as often.) Either a game should be all PvP... or none at all, in my mind.

[Joshatdot]

To me personally, it was removing Eyes of the Beast. I still miss it D:

oh! is that where you saw thru your pet? and/or was able to control the pet?

I briefly remember this & it was so cool!

[Kalliope]

To me personally, it was removing Eyes of the Beast. I still miss it D:

oh! is that where you saw thru your pet? and/or was able to control the pet?

I briefly remember this & it was so cool!

Can see more of it in action here: http://youtu.be/UacHT29OCs8

[Novikova]

LFD has its ups and downs. I've met some fantastic people through it. However, the vast majority are rude or silent. Oh, and being kicked right before a mount boss so 'their guildie can come'? Yeah, fun. I could go on but.

Personally, I think arenas have done a lot of damage to this game. They nerf things for pvp balance and often this does terrible things to pve. Oh, and god help you if you want to arena and aren't a druid/paladin/mage/whatever flavor of the month. It's pretty much never hunter or warlock. Hrk.

Activision. EA bought Bioware and that's terrible enough. Bioware and Blizzard are not companies you rush. You give them hugs and gently coax games. :/ DA II could've been so much more. I hate paying so much for short games.

Wrath was fun to me - I could derp it up, chat with my buddies and never fall far behind. I could /see/ many of the raids. I never got the specials like Invincible but I wasn't a 'scrub' either. Now I have to pray my group is geared, know what it's doing and isn't total asshats.

Edit: Oh, while the Mr. T commercials were funny... yeah.

[Royi]

The loss of community in whole.

In vanilla WoW, everything was server only. In battlegrounds you gained rivals from the opposite faction. For dungeons you had to have friends to get a group together. You couldn't just hop servers, change names, races, faction, etc. Everyone knew everyone back then.

Now, I can get an alt to max level and get decent gear with random dungeon finder without saying a word or knowing anyone on my server. Why should I when a group of random people is just a click away? For a shy person like me, I have a hard time making friends now than I did six years ago where I was "forced" to group up with people on my server. I STILL play with friends I made back then. If I didn't have them I wouldn't be playing this game anymore.

^^

With the exception of my guildies and REALID friends, since I'm newish still to my current server (about 1 year or so), I think I only actually have one friend in my friends list. Back in Vanilla or BC, I would have my friends list full most of the time, because well you needed to befriend people on the server that were outside of your guild so you could fill up dungeon runs. In all honesty I would gladly wait another 10 minutes in dungeon finder to get a few more from my own server. I know they allegedly try and group same realm, but it still rarely happens.

[Morven]

I do think they should have more ability to nerf or otherwise limit things for PVP balance without changing things for PvE. Or vice versa.

I am glad that they seem to be paying more attention in Cata to keeping all 3 specs of a class competitive in PvE, though. They're not quite there, but it's not as bad as in Wrath where BM hunters, Arms warriors and Subtlety rogues were ridiculously uncompetitive in PVE.

[Gimlion]

I've always wished that PvP and PvE were relatively separate within WoW, where changes/abilities for one's sake, wouldn't affect the other. Obviously, this would be hard to do in world PvP, but then again, World PvP isn't where the QQ and nerfs are coming from.

[Royi]

I've always wished that PvP and PvE were relatively separate within WoW, where changes/abilities for one's sake, wouldn't affect the other. Obviously, this would be hard to do in world PvP, but then again, World PvP isn't where the QQ and nerfs are coming from.

Flying mounts killed World PVP

In all honesty, I think flying mounts were a big mistake. It takes away the scenary and the beauty of the worlds that you would experience while on the ground. Sure you can fly up high to a neat peak, but with flying mounts you never really come across other people en route to your destination. It was always neat seeing fellow players ride by you while you were out and about.

[Worba]

Flying mounts killed World PVP

In all honesty, I think flying mounts were a big mistake. It takes away the scenary and the beauty of the worlds that you would experience while on the ground. Sure you can fly up high to a neat peak, but with flying mounts you never really come across other people en route to your destination. It was always neat seeing fellow players ride by you while you were out and about.

On the one hand I do agree with you in a general sense.

On the other hand if they didn't introduce flying mounts, I suspect that would have become a big selling point for other MMOs to take subscribers away from WoW.

Things like flying mounts and anonymous pugging I think were probably two necessary evils of growing the game to the size it is now.

Which is not to say everything is A-OK; it IS a problem of some kind, but I can't think of a 100% valid solution to it...

[Lisaara]

I've always wished that PvP and PvE were relatively separate within WoW, where changes/abilities for one's sake, wouldn't affect the other. Obviously, this would be hard to do in world PvP, but then again, World PvP isn't where the QQ and nerfs are coming from.

Flying mounts killed World PVP

In all honesty, I think flying mounts were a big mistake. It takes away the scenary and the beauty of the worlds that you would experience while on the ground. Sure you can fly up high to a neat peak, but with flying mounts you never really come across other people en route to your destination. It was always neat seeing fellow players ride by you while you were out and about.

Not really....I disagree.

Flying mounts give you a better PoV of the world so you can see everything. Also I see plenty of people in the skies even from the ground.

[GormanGhaste]

Flying mounts killed World PVP

I did notice my baby alts had an easier time running around putting out fires this midsummer!

[SylviaDragon]

well, um.... I'm not too fond of the real Id thing. I don’t use it and I have a friend or two who is constantly getting harassed and stalked by ppl on it and is always having to clear off names to try and keep it under control. =/

also I think making all 80,70 and 60 arena gear cost nothing but honor without dishing out a new set of gear, was a huge mistake. Suddenly you have all these twinks in what was at one point some of the best end-game gear you could get, and it cost about as much as a ball of lint.
The result is:
Bad players thinking they are good because they have epix and they can now do whatever they want because they wear purple now. (ungemed, unenchanted purple) Suddenly the world reaches a whole new level of cocky -.-

A loss of worth. You used to have some level of respect for someone who worked hard enough to get arena gear, now everyone has it and they get used to things being “easy” mode. “Why do I have to work for better gear? I had the best pvp gear in the game at lvl XX and it wasn’t this hard to get.”

No reason for the twinks to arena anymore. I understand pvp isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. But people who had twinks often had multiple accounts so they could have a solid bc 70, or vanilla 60. Now arena rewards them nothing, there wont be any new gear, they don’t get points, and everyone has the exact same gear. I was rather upset to find that the arena gear I had worked so hard for was now being handed out for free. Now that it’s free and there will be nothing to replace it with, what was the point? Many people asked this question to themselves and decided it wasn’t worth it and shut down the vanilla/bc accounts they had and just gave up because it wasn’t fun anymore and they had no rewards to work towards. No rewards=no desire to play= no desire to play= no more monthly payment=less money brought in. I know a lot of you really hate arena and are not too fond of pvp, but as someone who lvled up and was taken under the wing of a bunch of amazing, kind arena/pvp junkies, I saw it cripple the numbers and watched friends quit and it made me rather sad =/

[Joshatdot]

All of my toons just have the standard Gryphon flying mounts .. CBA to work on any others.

Same goes for grinding for JP/HP gear .. I just like playing my toons to lvl them. To me spending dozens to hundred hours playing the same dungeons over and over and over, does not sound fun to me.

[Ket Shi]

I wish they had started work on worgen females earlier so that they wouldn't have to shove them out the door a month before release. I like them as they are now, but I think they could have used more time and polish to fix stuff like the ears clipping into the head and the weird snarly face.

Biggest of all, though, is the catering to the hardcore crowd in Cataclysm. I used to enjoy popping into heroics -- not anymore. Even with the gradual nerfs over time, they're still so stressful that I don't even bother. Compared to WotLK, the amount of time and effort you spend versus the reward is just not fun for me.

[Slickrock]

I've always wished that PvP and PvE were relatively separate within WoW, where changes/abilities for one's sake, wouldn't affect the other. Obviously, this would be hard to do in world PvP, but then again, World PvP isn't where the QQ and nerfs are coming from.

Flying mounts killed World PVP

In all honesty, I think flying mounts were a big mistake. It takes away the scenary and the beauty of the worlds that you would experience while on the ground. Sure you can fly up high to a neat peak, but with flying mounts you never really come across other people en route to your destination. It was always neat seeing fellow players ride by you while you were out and about.

If you look at it with a Vanilla perspective, then yes. But, many things we do now couldn't be done without flying. (Archeology, for one, imagine that with no flying).

As the levels got higher, and the world got bigger, they needed to add flying.

[Slickrock]

PVP is fine, but I think arenas were the huge mistake. Nothing in the game has caused more balance issues and nerfs to PVE content than arenas. They should have left it at battlegrounds and been done with it.

[Lisaara]

I love the Real ID. MY real ID has become a hunter community message board mostly as I have a ton of hunters from my server on it and I let people. I've never been harassed on it.

I agree about Arena being something awful. and I also agree that heroics are no longer enjoyable and the troll heroics are way too damn long. You can't take a raid and make it successfully into a heroic and the point is proven with how many failures there are.

[Gimlion]

I agree about Arena being something awful. and I also agree that heroics are no longer enjoyable and the troll heroics are way too damn long. You can't take a raid and make it successfully into a heroic and the point is proven with how many failures there are.

I disagree on Arena, kind of. The concept and Idea behind it is awesome. Teaming up with 2-4 of your buddies to take out a team of the same amount of the 'enemy', and creatively stacking specs to make the best team sounds great.

Implementation, however, was very poorly done. They should have kept Arena and PvE changes separate, and doing that simple task, would have drastically simplified balancing for Blizzard in everything they needed.

[Lisaara]

I agree about Arena being something awful. and I also agree that heroics are no longer enjoyable and the troll heroics are way too damn long. You can't take a raid and make it successfully into a heroic and the point is proven with how many failures there are.

I disagree on Arena, kind of. The concept and Idea behind it is awesome. Teaming up with 2-4 of your buddies to take out a team of the same amount of the 'enemy', and creatively stacking specs to make the best team sounds great.

Implementation, however, was very poorly done. They should have kept Arena and PvE changes separate, and doing that simple task, would have drastically simplified balancing for Blizzard in everything they needed.

I think thats what they pretty much meant by it. It's awful as a whole because it's not being done properly. The idea is fine, but the presentation of it is horrid. If the presentation is horrid, well...it'sjust bad. Totalbiscuit even said this was terrible and should be separate.

EDIT: Maybe a better word would be the 'execution' of it was done poorly.

[Kayb]

nerfs/buffs etc on pvp/pve gear should only occur on relevent servers, not as a whole across the board.

pvp servers should been tuned according, with more/most/all buffs in favor of pvp stats. likewise for pve servers, keep it pve.

there is no way at all that this isn't possible with today's tech.

thats really how it should have been from the get go