Incoming long post. TL;DR at the end.
The game industry is full of starving talent.
There's a lot in
@Roboartist 's post I support, and rather than fill up a page with more "yeah, that", I want to unpack this one statement with which I disagree.
The game industry is full of starving people, not starving talent. I mean no disrespect to the people working themselves senseless to get the chance for their big break, but the game industry is like most industries -- full of starry-eyed people who want to be part of the dream, but who either can't or won't do what it takes to make it happen. Nothing wrong with that, but understand that finding top-tier talent really is that rare for companies like Blizzard, Microsoft, Google, etc. Plenty of great games and great entertainment in general have come from non-top talent, but we're talking about how established corporations find the people they need, and it's freakin' hard for them.
The WoW community as a whole and the twink subcommunity also face this issue. Let's talk about one of the fundamental conflicts within the twinking community, then extend that to WoW as a whole, and hopefully that will shed some light on why Blizzard makes some of the decisions it does.
Part of the twink community wants more games, and another part of the community wants better games. These two desires fundamentally conflict with each other. We cast our net wider and pick up more players who often start at the bottom of the heap, and we promote game information and experience that elevates the players who use it, which in turn pushes noncompetitive players out. This isn't intentionally "good" nor "bad", it's just how the conflicting process in the game works. The community wants (and needs) both approaches. But we very much can judge "good" and "bad" of how we and how Blizzard manage the results of this conflicting process.
When someone gets into a battleground and absolutely wrecks it,
regardless of the reason, we ask hard questions about why that happened, and what (if anything) should be done about it. It doesn't matter if the player is amazing at PvP, uses exploited ilvl 180 gear, leverages questionable addons, or any other possible cause or combination. The fact is, one person wrecking a BG takes the game out of the hands of the other players in the battleground, and that experience ultimately drives players away. That's a design issue within WoW that Blizzard has yet to effectively address. Now, let's extend this to all of WoW.
What do you do when you make a gear-based game, but the majority of your playerbase doesn't take the time to understand the gearing system you developed? What do you do when you create a specific space to play the game a certain way, and then players arrive with conflicting reasons for playing there? What do you do when a minor part of your game (and PvP is minor, have no doubt) costs considerable resources to develop and maintain, but neglecting that part of the game aggravates a vocal minority of the playerbase who in turn can sour your other players? Many more examples abound, which bring us to this:
As I said before in a previous post, some of you here are looking at the cold logistics of business that may or may not work, but are in the sole interest of revenue for the higher-ups and not the fanbase. My arguement is that Blizzard is not creating games for gamers, they're creating games to make money. If you create a good product, money revenue comes passively and both sides win. If you make a shitty, but "good enough" product that relies on micro transactions instead of implemented content that people are paying for monthly, you'll still get revenue but only for a set amount of time before the playerbase has had enough.
While this is true, WoW has the particularly strong problem of a conflicting playerbase. A ton of people play this game, and some of Blizzard's design choices set them against each other such that fixing one problem can cause issues elsewhere. It's easy to say that chasing money can piss off the playerbase, and that Blizzard neglects its players to the risk of WoW's solvency, and I think few would argue with that. But WoW faces some long-term issues that they have yet to surmount, and the game is still dealing with the consequences of some design decisions that made sense at the time, but ended up eroding the game community.
TL;DR: The vast majority of us who play WoW don't actually excel at playing WoW, nor do we need to, to enjoy WoW. But because people enjoy the game in different ways, conflicts come up that Blizzard can't easily resolve without losing a significant number of players. Sure, Blizzard made some profit-oriented, questionable decisions for WoW. But much more frequently, Blizzard tries to grapple with how to feed and raise the hydra of a community it created.
