I really do think there's an element of the devs fooling themselves

I 100% believe that this was the case in WOW Classic TBC Gold Hearthstone. I haven't played in a long time but back when they started adding cards would be some new broken strategy everyone had to play and Blizzard sat around for weeks saying everything was fine prior to waiting to launch a few half-assed counter in the next expansion. When it failed they eventually delivered a balance patch to repair the original issue. I'm sure people stuck around just to see if the new cards would alter whatever so the player numbers were boosted.

Agree. I really do think there's an element of the devs fooling themselves into thinking their"methods" and articles are kind of pleasure. They definitely"overdesign", starting with the benefits and working backwards from there rather than really thinking if those systems themselves are fun.

However, in BFA, everyone understood Azerite armor was crap in beta and blizzard said dont worry we've got fixes in store. In Beta shamans were terrible and had many bugs and problems which weren't addressed. The initial tier comes around and rather than these fixing shamans they say the first patch Shamans will probably be repaired. They made insect fixing shamans a material attribute in the first significant patch in an attempt to keep people subscribed or deliver them back to the game.

I have and never will know why they keep shooting themselves in the foot like this. Wouldn't expanding upon a system rather than scrapping it and doing anything else be better for them? They'd spare time not having to design a completely different system, and most of the time the machine they are actually already using, they have only spent a year fixing. Why go through that cycle instead of cheap WOW TBC Classic Gold using the fixed system.