Can’t vote either “yes” or “no”, because I’m neither for nor against Battle Pass per se. What I liked about the Battle Pass was essentially free content – just like the base game, I had to pay for only once – and the challenges. Neither of those things has to be implemented as a Battle Pass.
The biggest reason I have against removing Battle Pass is that it was supposed to drive engagement, but again, that doesn’t have come in the form of a Battle Pass. They could do something else to the game to drive engagement and keep things fresh enough for people to play more regularly.
And if they don’t care about engagement anymore, then I doubt my vote on a forum poll will change their minds.
If you treat them like a customer research survey, then yeah, they’re utterly worthless. They do, however, have their own unique advantages.
Yeah, that’s one them.
There are numbers and number. Knowing which way the “highly motivated” part of your playerbase leans can be useful.
One of the biggest problems we see in creative industries dominated by corporations is precisely the idea that you can quantify everything and let that drive your decisions. It’s basically the McNamara fallacy.
The redistribution you describe will happen, but not the way you describe it. As others have explained, you don’t hire a painter to weld or a welder to paint.
When it comes to game development, the line between artists and engineers is blurred – try making a complex shader without being able to write code – but it still exists. Yeah, there are bugs that will require artists, but not the ones the community is complaining about stridently, the ones players call “game breaking”.
One big exception I can think of is, as @Cauthey has put it elsewhere, fixing the Crom-cursed mesh. That said, I’m a bit skeptical of the idea that Funcom would pull people off the BP to finally do that.
I also saw them say many other things that didn’t come true over time. People making in-game furniture, building pieces, armors, weapons, and emotes are unlikely to fix whatever is causing you to fall through the floor while the server is under heavy load, or whatever is causing random items to be dropped from your inventory.
I’ll believe the whole “no BP means more bugfixes” when I see more bugfixes and fewer new bugs.