Can the WoW community ever become what it once was again?

[Namalia]

I would hope not.

Especially after that raging cesspool that those clamoring for that "community" over the last several days has shown.

I'll take WoD's community over that mess any day.

[l33t]

Nope. It is a pretty much default way of evolution of gamers in a game. At the start of a new game everyone is a noob, but, let people play for a couple of years and you'll have good players segredated from bad players by a wide range of things like levels, gear, talent points, skill point, crafting, game experience etc. Now, while at that point good players still tolerate bad players, give them another couple of years and good players become even better while bad players will remain bad. At this point good players already understood that bad players are nothing but a burden, and try not to group with bad players to avoid bad game experience. Now give them another couple of years and bad players would be universally hated by good players (any good player who had at least once run a raid or a dungeon with bad players actually knows why), while bad players will hate good players as well as a result of a defensive reaction and your typical humanistic hature of putting "us vs them" in everything. That is where we are now, at the pinnacle of any game community evolution. People who are praising ff14 now, I dare you to come back in 10 years to ff14 and see what the community there has become - and I bet it would be the same, because it is a basic human nature and you can't fix that with anything.

Does that mean good players effectively never help not so good players? Nope.
Does that mean bad players can't stop being bad? Nope.
Does that mean you can't find a group of people to play with even if you are a bad player? Nope.
Does that means you would never get the same community in a 10-year old game as you had in a 1-year old game? Yes, no matter what developers would or could do.

Now, going directly to your propositions OP:
- Removing things to do solo we already had in WoD. Was that fun, no character progression in anything beside raids? Looking at sub losses it wasn't.
- Adding more group quests. Will just lead to bad players skipping that quests alltogether while good players form their own groups of good players to do that quests. Your wet dream of good players grouping together with bad players to do some group quests is just impossible, period.
- Removing LFD - is pretty much stupid, since LFD at the moment does more good to bad players than it does to good ones. Why? Because its the bad players you need to entertain in the game, since good players already have their guilds and groups of friends they play with.
- Removing LFR - same as above.
- Removing xrealm - I would LOVE that to happen, but sadly that's unrealistic.
- As for nonraiding-based character progression, Blizzard are doing quite not bad job with that in Legion with their Adventure mode and Mythic+ dungeons.

[BeneditaNBeatriz]

you will never have a community in a game that allows you to just encounter people instanced , you can queue for everything, you get teleported everywhere, you fly everywhere, you don't even have to level up anymore.

[Packing an i5]

no.. its full of people who feel entitled because they have played the game for 5+ years or whiny teens that just started. Alot of the friendly and helpful people left a long time ago because work and family got in the way or they just got tired of it and found other ways to occupy their time.

[idunnowatdo]

nope. we are too much of assholes to each other.

[Tijuana]

Great example here of WHY the community can never be "what it once was."

People spouting misinformation to support their notion that for some inexplicable reason the community is worse, presumably to justify their own disinterest or perhaps need to fit in?

The player never had to rely on others to level. Never. You were just a noob. In Classic, the fastest way to level was to grind 1-40. This was for a few reasons, first of all because of travel. Travel was a severe hindrance on the world, and having to run for 10 minutes, kill mobs for 10 was very poor exp per hour. Zones were so poorly made in Classic, that you would often have to grind anyway unless you wanted to constantly switch zones.

No one would disagree that there was not enough quest xp. But disregarding Nessingwary quests isn't exactly accurate either. Pretty much everyone did those quests, and collected those stupid pages.

[Alyxanna]

Just look around on any forum related to WoW.

The answer is staring you plain in the face.

[Pantalaimon]

Seriously, another one of these same threads? Better get my copy & paste tool for this one.

You are never going to form the same level of community you are looking for because you will never be able to universally tune world mobs & quests to be equally challenging for players who have vastly different levels of gear & skill. Do you honestly believe you'll be able to force players to look to the community for help to do quests when we still have active players that have *soloed* earlier tier raid bosses of our current expansion? They won't need the community's help. Do you really think you could tune world mobs to be challenging for people with the last expansion's raid gear without the mobs roflstomping new players/players who never raided during hte last expansion?

I also have to roll my eyes every time someone says you don't need to talk to people in the current game community to do challenging group content. Let me guess, you don't mythic raid, do challenge modes, or high end pvp (both arenas & rbgs) right? Just because you don't need to talk to people when doing lfr, random bgs, or even normal raiding depending on your group it doesn't mean that the game doesn't have challenging group content & that also doesn't mean that you can achieve great levels of success if you don't form a group community of sorts to talk together about the strats to do said content.

[Masoner]

TBC's progression system was HORRIBLE, and I am glad that they have moved on from it. It was a DISASTER. I can only hope and pray that they never return to something that stupid.

This so much, I'm so glad that the "we need 40 emblems of the legion" which requires you to kill 120 single mobs to get those 40 types of quest are gone.

[Aurabolt]

Before I begin, I started playing in mid-TBC. WotLK was announced a year or two after I started playing WoW. Anyway, Attunements will not come back ever. It was REMOVED for the same reason LFD and LFR were ultimately introduced: The Community used Attunements, Cheevos and Gearscore (in Wrath) to deny players from raiding period.

One thing I conceded 4 years ago is the 1-85 level experience is useless for learning how to properly use your class and spec. You won't have access to all the key core and utility skills until level 85 for most classes and 90 for all (excluding DH). It still helps, though. People shit on LFD at every opportunity but during the 1-85 level experience, this is where new players learn how to play their classes for when they get to 85.

There is an even quicker way to learn your class fast: Soloing older raids and Heroic dungeons. All classes can solo most raids up to MoP (the only raid I haven't soloed yet is Madness of Deathwing) plus all the MoP Heroics and the World Bosses on Pandaria. That said, I've soloed Oondasta and Sha of Fear at 100 with a Paladin, Warlock and Death Knight. In Legion, all MoP Raids should be easily soloable and most WoD heroics should be as well.

You want a fast track to learning how to pull your weight in a current dungeon or raid? Solo 80-100 Heroic Raids and Dungeons. Heroic LK is great practice: Even at 100, you can't ignore the punt mechanic during the fight. Same with Lei Shen =D

[l33t]

You want a fast track to learning how to pull your weight in a current dungeon or raid? Solo 80-100 Heroic Raids and Dungeons. Heroic LK is great practice: Even at 100, you can't ignore the punt mechanic during the fight. Same with Lei Shen =D

What the hell did I just read?

Dude, any class in ~690 ilvl just comes to Arthas, uses potion, BL drums, personal cooldowns and voila, boss is dead in 15 seconds. Just like that...

[Deleted]

This so much, I'm so glad that the "we need 40 emblems of the legion" which requires you to kill 120 single mobs to get those 40 types of quest are gone.

Have you never done a apexis daily...?

I have zero clue why you think that game design ever left...

- - - Updated - - -

Seriously, another one of these same threads? Better get my copy & paste tool for this one.

You are never going to form the same level of community you are looking for because you will never be able to universally tune world mobs & quests to be equally challenging for players who have vastly different levels of gear & skill. Do you honestly believe you'll be able to force players to look to the community for help to do quests when we still have active players that have *soloed* earlier tier raid bosses of our current expansion? They won't need the community's help. Do you really think you could tune world mobs to be challenging for people with the last expansion's raid gear without the mobs roflstomping new players/players who never raided during hte last expansion?

I also have to roll my eyes every time someone says you don't need to talk to people in the current game community to do challenging group content. Let me guess, you don't mythic raid, do challenge modes, or high end pvp (both arenas & rbgs) right? Just because you don't need to talk to people when doing lfr, random bgs, or even normal raiding depending on your group it doesn't mean that the game doesn't have challenging group content & that also doesn't mean that you can achieve great levels of success if you don't form a group community of sorts to talk together about the strats to do said content.

I have completed every raid before nerfs save for sunwell, uld zero light, and lk due to a combination of work and school I had back then. The fact the game is currently balanced and tuned to be a joke for players who openly drool onto their keyboard is actually a issue. Sure the very,very top level of play hasn't changed but everything below it has. The world doesn't posses any danger anymore at all... When a player can pull two dozen mobs and end with more hp then he started with after you done fucked up in terms of design.

I don't believe wow can get by anymore by just offering a good experience in high level play anymore. They need to actively make a game that provides some level of challenge from start to finish.

[Aurabolt]

What the hell did I just read?

Dude, any class in ~690 ilvl just comes to Arthas, uses potion, BL drums, personal cooldowns and voila, boss is dead in 15 seconds. Just like that...

That's assuming the player is level 100, which I didn't. You also assume everyone's a Horde Shaman >.>;

That said, my personal record is 35 seconds on that note--with my Lv. 100 Human Warlock XD

[Pantalaimon]

Have you never done a apexis daily...?

I have zero clue why you think that game design ever left...

- - - Updated - - -



I have completed every raid before nerfs save for sunwell, uld zero light, and lk due to a combination of work and school I had back then. The fact the game is currently balanced and tuned to be a joke for players who openly drool onto their keyboard is actually a issue. Sure the very,very top level of play hasn't changed but everything below it has. The world doesn't posses any danger anymore at all... When a player can pull two dozen mobs and end with more hp then he started with after you done fucked up in terms of design.

I don't believe wow can get by anymore by just offering a good experience in high level play anymore. They need to actively make a game that provides some level of challenge from start to finish.

Yeah see making the game challenging "from start to finish" is much more compex of an issue than you're making it out to be. Who are we making it challenging for? You can't simply say "everyone" and then execute a plan that will do exactly that, it's not possible. The reason I gave the examples that I did above was to help illustrate that. When players transition from one expansion to another there will be a WIDE gap both in terms of what quality of gear every player has as well as how well they do or do not adapt to the varying degrees of class changes the new expansion brings. Both of these issues will drastically affect how 'easy' or 'challenging' the leveling will be for those players. In turn, the individual interpretation of said challenge will potentially influence players to decide how much they will or will not seek after other members in the WoW community to help them with various tasks, be it single player/group questing, rare mobs, low level dungeons, raids, end game pvp, etc etc. Blizzard will NEVER create a game "that provides some level of challenge from start to finish" for every type of player because such an aspiration is entirely subjective and vastly depends on the individual skill & gear combination that makes up the playstyle of each gamer.

[l33t]

That's assuming the player is level 100, which I didn't. You also assume everyone's a Horde Shaman >.>;

That said, my personal record is 35 seconds on that note--with my Lv. 100 Human Warlock XD

Don't you know that anyone can buy and use Drums of Bloodlust, a consumable item crafted by leatherworkers which grants upon use sligtly worse (25% instead of 30) version of Bloodlust? Here, get the wowhead link

[Deleted]

Yeah see making the game challenging "from start to finish" is much more compex of an issue than you're making it out to be. Who are we making it challenging for? You can't simply say "everyone" and then execute a plan that will do exactly that, it's not possible. The reason I gave the examples that I did above was to help illustrate that. When players transition from one expansion to another there will be a WIDE gap both in terms of what quality of gear every player has as well as how well they do or do not adapt to the varying degrees of class changes the new expansion brings. Both of these issues will drastically affect how 'easy' or 'challenging' the leveling will be for those players. In turn, the individual interpretation of said challenge will potentially influence players to decide how much they will or will not seek after other members in the WoW community to help them with various tasks, be it single player/group questing, rare mobs, low level dungeons, raids, end game pvp, etc etc. Blizzard will NEVER create a game "that provides some level of challenge from start to finish" for every type of player because such an aspiration is entirely subjective and vastly depends on the individual skill & gear combination that makes up the playstyle of each gamer.

True but I feel we can both agree the current model of being able to kill a dozen mobs isn't productive...

There will always be outliners but the bar shouldn't be so low that it sinks through the floor... I shouldn't be able to level from 90-100 without gear... at some point we have to take a step back and ask wtf happened?

[Lliam]

I shouldn't be able to level from 90-100 without gear... at some point we have to take a step back and ask wtf happened?

Blizzard providing an environment where you don't have to improve as a player to experience end-game content is what happened.

Casual players complaining that they couldn't experience the game as intended because they weren't good enough has led to the complete gutting and pruning of classes and their abilities. It's almost comical to look at the empty husk that classes have become as opposed to past expansions.

[Jinpachi]

To many plebs QQing that LFR still is to hard, so no I dont think wow will ever be what it used to be.

LOL point me to ONE SINGLE THREAD where this actually happens. I need a good laugh

[Namalia]

If you mean, will it ever turn into a wretched hive of scum and elitism again (like Nostalrius), I hope not.

[Jinpachi]

I am talking about how the game worked way back when in the golden age of vanilla and tbc. When a player almost had to rely on others to level with challenging group quests and world mobs that posed at least a moderate threat to players.

Then there is the whole end game. Where one it was a game focused on forming connections and working with other players to advance and accomplish common goals it has increasingly become a solo player game. Devoid of challenge and rewarding the worst of the worst with slow dull repetitive gameplay. This game design slowly killed off any kind of community outside of what the top players managed to create. This toxic system slowly burns and grinds down players trying to advance by tossing one grind after another at them in a endless cycle of catch up. From lfr to apexis then to conquest.

Is there a way to return to the slow system of steady progression we used to have or has the idea of instant gratification simply destroyed any chance of that happening in favor of "its my wel-fare epics and I want them now!" ?

Honestly man, I dont think its a WoW problem, or MOBA problem, or GAME problem. The problem is with the people who play them. Most of them think they are all smarter/wittier/edgier/more hardcore/etc. than anyone else, and they build up this air of superiority around them. Hurr durr look at my gaming achievements, bla bla bla. For those of us who just want to have fun playing, no matter what else is going on, it gets pretty damn tiresome. The community will improve when these types are put in check. And it will take a community to do that. Self policing communities ftw.