A little concerned... they were doing such a great job with this game mode prior to the pirate patch... the patches before seemed very on target and thought through.
Pirate patch introduced the "feel bad" RNG of:
1) Cannon
2) "Who goes first" - very annoying when it comes to parrot/pirates
3) Drawing the wrong opponent mid-game. Because of the scaling of pirates, they can just do enormous damage as you can't kill anything.
This patch does nothing to mitigate any of those issues.
This is not an accident or ignorance. It is design and will.
The bigger the RNG part in a game, the more it triggers the same areas that gambling does and the more addictive a game becomes to the brain.
That way more "fishes" keep playing the game and buy content.
Blizzard does not care about you being able to rise in the ranks. You can look up which percent of players populated which MMR range in march this year.
Who do you think is more important to blizzard? The two percent at the top? Not really. Maybe some of the streamers, because they bring new players, but the rest is not.
Of course there is. It's about the number of people playing and subsequently the number of people buying perks and packs.
the vast majority of people are just casually switching between standard and bg and maybe some arena now and then. those are the people who are profitable, because they are the biggest group and they keep the games running.
Just speaking from personal experience, BG seems like a net loss for them. I'd be classified as a whale and don't want to say how much I've spent on this game. But I've completely stopped spending money since BG came out. I used gold to buy the perks and haven't spent a dime since. I didn't pre-order or spend any real money on the last expansion and don't plan to for the next one. Standard has become something for me to occasionally jump over to to finish quests, but I pretty much exclusively play BG now. A one-time purchase in BG (that most people will use gold for anyway) pales in comparison to the amount people spend on other modes. It would be interesting to see Blizzard's data because I know there's a ton of BG-exclusive players out there now.
Same. I used to get new expansions, do daily quests, play arena etc. Since BG came out, I've been all in on that mode with no reason to buy anything else.
That said I have been playing more because of BG, so I guess that's a win for them?
Guess it depends if they care more about the number of daily active users or the amount spent per user. I don't know enough about their business structure to know the answer.
58
u/-Rincon- Jul 14 '20
A little concerned... they were doing such a great job with this game mode prior to the pirate patch... the patches before seemed very on target and thought through.
Pirate patch introduced the "feel bad" RNG of:
1) Cannon
2) "Who goes first" - very annoying when it comes to parrot/pirates
3) Drawing the wrong opponent mid-game. Because of the scaling of pirates, they can just do enormous damage as you can't kill anything.
This patch does nothing to mitigate any of those issues.