Happy New Year /v/! I’ve been playing wow for a long time, coming in late to Vanilla, but got through MC and into BWL before TBC. I’ve consistently played through every expansion/pre-patch lull, holiday and summer dips, etc.Over the past couple months the population drop has been dramatic. What in the actual hell is going on? The third-party population tracking sites seem to back this up, and this time seems much different than previous lulls. A few things stand out to me and I believe need some reflection by the appropriate decision makers:>Recent ban waves have reportedly drive away long-time players including multi-decade veterans who weren’t willing to start fresh and rebuy, etc.>The “report” system now being embedded in nearly every interface element seems to have chilled the community atmosphere. Players are wary of chatting, joking or grouping with others, and the system is widely abused.>Automated NLP moderation has made its way into chat policing. While the idea of reducing toxicity was good, it feels the threshold is so low that even mildly abrasive chat is flagged and banned with minimal context or ability to actually appeal.>The elephant in the room: removal/restrictions of addons has hit the game’s veteran community hard. For many of us, addons were a part of WoW’s DNA providing additional opportunity for personalization, accessibility, etcI understand Blizzards desire to modernize the game and appeal to a new generation of players. From what I see, these changes don’t seem to be bringing in any new players, just pushing old ones out. So many friends have left the game for the above reasons, and aren’t getting replaced with the new ones. The social fabric feels weaker, player options removed and world less “alive” in general.Feels bad man.
>>729859082>new generation of playersNon-existant.
>Food analogy
>>729859082The playerbase has gotten so old that they've started contracting diseases and dying off and younger players are too busy playing roblox and extraction shooters to care about some ancient shitty MMO.
>>729859850>younger players are too busy playing extraction shootersnice try bungie, nobody wants that concord-tier marathon slop
I just goon to Draenei 34.
>>729860794ARC Raiders man
>The “report” system now being embedded in nearly every interface element seems to have chilled the community atmosphere. Players are wary of chatting, joking or grouping with others, and the system is widely abused.Wow, I wonder why this sounds incredibly familiar.There isn't a single online community that doesn't have this problem. How the fuck do we convince retarded devs/admins to be more hands off? Not a dig at /v/ as much as you would probably imagine it is.
I used to work at McDonalds, you are getting the same fucking patties as the shitter sandwiches you are literally just paying for extra bread and lettuce for the most part with a Big Mac. Why would you ever do that?
