What: buffed
February 29, 2024 at 12:37 p.m. – Season of Discovery is also such a good WoW Classic project because a lot is communicated by the devs. Players also want the same from the retail team. Why is the retail team so quiet in comparison?
WoW: Dragonflight offers players more interim patches than almost any expansion before and, after Shadowlands, it feels like it has brought a small boost to Blizzard's MMO. The success of WoW itself is certainly also due to the Classic team, which is currently not only pushing forward the Classic expansions WotLK and Cataclysm (register for the beta now), but has also given WoW Classic a new twist with Season of Discoveries Classic fans love it.
The small Classic team around Holly Longdale, Josh Greenfield, Tim Jones and Co. deliver new hotfixes, balance updates, implement new items and communicate with players via various channels almost every week. This is what you currently want from WoW (buy now): Dragonflight. The question arises, why doesn't the large WoW retail team communicate like the Classic team? The WoW Community Council is now also asking itself this question.
Why does the small Classic team communicate better than the Retail WoW team?
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As a Community Council member notes, the Blue Tracker (Blizzard's Blue posts) is mostly filled with changes and updates for Season of Discovery. Unless a new trading post theme or hero talent trees are being introduced for the next WoW expansion The War Within, that's true.
You can also see this in the weekly posts “The Week in WoW”, in which the most exciting information often concerns the Season of Discovery and possibly soon also Cataclysm Classic.
The communication between Classic and Retail WoW is a difference like day and night.
Maybe it's due to the fairly experimental phases of SoD or the fact that the developers at Retail are currently preparing for Dragonflight Season 4 and the alpha of The War Within.
The last dev video for retail PvP was seven years ago
Source: World of Warcraft YouTube The then Senior Game Designer for WoW and Brian Holinka in the PvP Q&A with Community Manager Josh Allen The communication from WoW Retail in the PvP area is particularly devastating. You haven't noticed this since Brian Holinka left the company as lead combat and lead PvP designer in mid-2023.
For every balance update for PvP, there are what feels like 10 PvE balance hotfixes. Brian Holinka and Community Manager Josh “Lore” Allen addressed the community in Legion's last PvP Q&A – and that was seven years ago. The focus has always been clearly on the game's PvE content.
The lack of communication may also be partly due to fluctuation in the retail WoW team. As is well known, things have gone haywire at the Californian games company in recent years. More layoffs were recently announced as part of the Microsoft takeover. Does it also seem to you as if the small Clasic team communicates better and more than Hazzikostas and his retail team?