Why Legion will still be stale in the end.

[Howard Moon]

Watch out OP, people calling you an arrogant elitist incoming...

[Zhira]

Vanilla was one big "content drought" at max level unless you did raids, the same for TBC. Not to tick anyone off, but if you think otherwise you clearly didn't play at that time.

Edit:

.... but then again, the game was new and fresh, so most people weren't so picky about content at that time.

Z.

[Howard Moon]

Early wow was a labor of love, which happened to be very successful. Modern wow is business optimized for out-of-the-box experience, roughly the first 2 months of an expansion', and subsequent subscription retention is based on low cost/high margin maximization through the 'HOOK model' (model and theory for customer habit formation). This is why you see predominantly cheap reward mechanisms (achievements) and lots of content reuse (multi difficulties dungeon/raids, gear reuse with just different numbers in the textbox). It is spun as 'making content 'accessible', but it is purely a spending optimization exercise.

The cynic in me really likes this response.

[Pua]

Early wow was a labor of love, which happened to be very successful. Modern wow is business optimized for out-of-the-box experience, roughly the first 2 months of an expansion', and subsequent subscription retention is based on low cost/high margin maximization through the 'HOOK model' (model and theory for customer habit formation). This is why you see predominantly cheap reward mechanisms (achievements) and lots of content reuse (multi difficulties dungeon/raids, gear reuse with just different numbers in the textbox). It is spun as 'making content 'accessible', but it is purely a spending optimization exercise.

Ultimately, this is what it boils down to.

The game is made to be profitable nowadays and, if it also happens to be good, then that's considered a happy side effect. When it was first built, it was built as an open-world adventure that players had to become immersed in before they could properly enjoy it. At this stage of the game's development, it's simply a case of making content stretch as far as you can possibly make it stretch (normal/Heroic/Mythic/Mythic+ dungeons or LFR/Normal/Heroic/Mythic raids), rather than providing lots of it. The problem is that each "setting" isn't content in itself, and players will generally gravitate toward whatever suits their skill, availability and social circle best.

Of course, Blizzard also spent three expansions designing for difficulty fetishists thanks to the volume of forum noise they make. That didn't help, and essentially had the impact of patronizing players who weren't interested in extreme levels of twitch-reaction difficulty (a passive form of ageism, when you think about it). Ever since then, an issue started in Cataclysm, the very concept of endgame has been about excluding more and more people from the top end, while shovelling more and more people in at the bottom end.

What you end up with is a community forced to play together, when they've no business doing so. Frustration ensues all around.

Legion is trying to do something about that, and we can all only hope that it's successful.

[Pull My Finger]

Interesting opinion absolutely denied by evidence. If 99% never experience the drought, then there wasn't really much of a drought now was there? Its like saying that if 1% of people are rich, then everyone must therefore be rich. I mean, of course, rich people exist, just like droughts did used to exist, however to claim that everyone is now rich or everyone then experienced droughts because of this is quite honestly the most hilarious use of logic I have ever encountered and will be dismissed by most sane people immediately.

The rest of your post is as ignorable as the logic it follows.

Yeah, whine on. What a bunch of empty talk. Yeah, I agree it's hilarious that you're mentioning "logic" and "evidence". You don't have the slightest clue what you're talking about. You're making your shit up on the spot. What do YOU know about the percentage of people who "experienced a drought" during any given period?

If you had any idea of "logic" or facts, or would be interested in them, instead of putting your BS whine spin on the whole thing, you couldn't do anything else but to realize that the content drought was something that was part of WoW since day one. Yeah, but funny how that works - if it's your BS stance, then it's "evidence", but if it's something you disagree with, then it's something someone else "perceived". Typical windbag whiner.

[PuffyPussy22]

Vanilla was one big "content drought" at max level unless you did raids, the same for TBC. Not to tick anyone off, but if you think otherwise you clearly didn't play at that time.

Edit:

.... but then again, the game was new and fresh, so most people weren't so picky about content at that time.

Z.

Yes, and the current game is a content drought even if you do raids. Its just that it doesn't include most of the casual endgame of new 5 man dungeons, new 10 man dungeons, class sets, class quests, 15 man raids, profession systems that end up anywhere. I mean hell, just BRD was like every dungeon we get now in one area. Think about that for a moment.

However, lets pretend none of those things even existed in Vanilla WoW just to make your point. Even if those things never existed and there was truly nothing to do unless you raided, it still stands that even if you do raid there is nothing to do in the current game and there stands the difference.

[TheDestinatus]

Vanilla was one big "content drought" at max level unless you did raids, the same for TBC. Not to tick anyone off, but if you think otherwise you clearly didn't play at that time.

Edit:

.... but then again, the game was new and fresh, so most people weren't so picky about content at that time.

Z.

World of Warcraft is a big "content drought" at all levels when you just don't do anything, the same with any game. If you think otherwise clearly you don't play the game.

[deniter]

Vanilla was one big "content drought" at max level unless you did raids, the same for TBC. Not to tick anyone off, but if you think otherwise you clearly didn't play at that time.
Z.

That's odd, i didn't realise at all i had no content in vanilla and TBC as a non-raider. I guess i had too much fun running 5 mans and just missed this fact.

[Deleted]

The only thing that didn't go stale for me was vanilla, which also happens to be the one expansion I didn't really raid in (I don't count tagging along for a single run every 2-3 months when it's being farmed to death).

The thing is, I'd still say vanilla wow was the most boring version of the game to me as everything took so long it wasn't really enjoyable. To me it feels like they allowed every patch in it to near staleness and then added new content. Since then we get new content roughly at the speed the upper 25% of raiding guilds consume it. Combined with increased development time on new expansions due to the amount of content required at the start and the finite story/gameplay allotted to each expansion and you can figure out why the end of expansions is allowed to last for so long.

The weirdest part though is that, ever since the wotlk-cata transition, I find myself playing more in the last 2-3 months of an expansion than in the period before simply because I'm tying up lose ends. I've been way more active achievement hunting and clearing out all content than I was before and I'm not the only one in my guild.

[Wries]

Agree with OP. New player joins WoW. Accepts level 100 boost. Goes into Tanaan and gets showered in blues and purples. Joins LFR Archimonde, the very last boss of the expansion on their first night of playing.

- Archimonde is dead. Who's next?

- Well, him again. Next week

- Why?

- You get more gear

- Will this gear be useful for the next upcoming raid?

- No.. Your gear will be useless come next patch. Heck, even if it wasn't a new expansion incoming in the next patch, your gear progression from this patch would probably be next-to useless. You're still expected to do this, though.

I have a hard time imagining that this game design is having any kind of success keeping new players around.

[Phurox]

All expansions are stale at the end. Why did you feel the need to make a thread about this?

What are you talking about? WoD has never been stale.

/s

[Felfaadaern Darkterror]

All these posts seem to start from the assumption that having periods in your life when you don't play WoW for several hours every week is a bad thing.

I grew up watching college football with my Dad. It's the one spectator sport I still enjoy; I can still feel him in the room on Saturdays in the Fall. College football goes through a content drought for several months every year. That's ok, just helps us appreciate it more when the new season starts.

[WowIsDead64]

No. While game was new, majority of players were "Killers" and "Explorers" - they were satisfied by gaming process itself and by exploring the world. So, that's why they didn't care about amount of content - even small portions of content, like new 5ppls, were enough. But according to Bartle every player turns into "Achiever" at some point. And when player becomes "Achiever" - he starts needing goals to achieve, i.e. content to do. That's when Blizzard realized, that they can't produce enough content. But good thing about "Achievers" - is that in opposition to "Killes" and "Explorers" they consume content very slowly. "Killers" and "Explorers" - are very short term and "cyclical" players, who quit game as soon, as content stops being new and fresh. "Achievers" may do the same raid on 10 alts and sometimes it even bad for them, when content is released in too quick pace - they don't have time to achieve everything, they want. And as more and more players were becoming "Achievers", Blizzard decided, that they need to release bigger content patches but less often. Yeah, they've lost half of players due to making this decision. But wait! WOD has shown us, that this half of players returns only for 1-2 months, when new xpack is being released. Should Blizzard try to keep them? I guess not. But Blizzard try. Blizzard still try to make outdoor content specially for "Killers" and "Explorers" - remove flying, make world "more immersive", encourage WPVP. They want to keep this players playing for as long as possible. But via doing it, Blizzard sacrifice interests of their most stable players - "Achievers" and "Socializers". For example Blizzard try to achieve compromise between pro-flyers and anti-flyers. There is no flying, while content is fresh and new, so they cater to "Killers" and "Explorers", and when content obsoletes and, as Blizzard assume, every players becomes "Achiever" or "Socializer" - flying returns to game. But they may lose both as the result. "Killers" and "Explorers" will quit after 1-2 months of playing anyway and "Achievers" and "Socializers" will lose trust in Blizzard. Yeah. I'm "Achiever". And 1 year of no flying - is too long time for me. I won't buy Legion at launch, as it happened with WOD, and there is a big chance, that I won't buy it at all.

[ComputerNerd]

Lower tiers of raiding are not the entire experience, hence why people choose to raid higher formats.
Those in LFR or normal are not "seeing everything".

[Eroginous]

Blizzard has decided that their game is best developed as a disposable content mill. You buy the game, make a character, get to the level cap, do the current tier, and then wait for the next one to come out. Or the next expansion. This is why there are content droughts. They design the content to be a temporary experience for players. You have to force yourself to play it more than once if you want to keep busy with 'content' between patches.

The problem with this design vs the Vanilla design, is that when they are announcing new expansions, it draws a lot of people to come play. Some of those are new players, a lot are probably veteran players, and the end result is always the same: people get bored long before another patch comes out with new stuff. Compare that to Vanilla, where you essentially spent months leveling and enjoying dungeons before any raid content came out, and then you spent months doing the raid content so everyone in your 40 man raid could get geared from 2 drops per boss, it didn't give you time to be bored.

There wasn't a content drought in Vanilla because content stayed relevant for much much longer. When you finally cleared MC, you weren't just face rolling it for a couple more weeks to get everyone their last couple pieces, you were still running it for weeks to get alts and raid subs geared so that eventually you could have it on farm and just do it because it's fun. That, and the next tier tied into the last one, there was overlap in power. The differences in rewards were marginal, to the extent that in most cases, you could full clear Naxx with a mixture of gear from all raids. The most accomplished raiders.... had their full sets. Like the 1% of the 1%. Everyone else looked ragtag in their clown suits of mix matched sets from different raids.

The game was just a lot different back then. You focused on playing the game instead of beating it, and that's something I don't think they'll ever get back, tbh.

[Aleks0410]

Well written post. Agree 100%

[Deleted]

No idea if it's been said already, but the devs have been saying it's been a focus of theirs to make the dungeons in legions more relevant throughout the entire expansion. None of us know exactly how effective it'll be but maybe it's going to be brilliant. Mythic+ seems like it's going to add more challenge than ever and is something you could always work on upgrading, dungeons will have a very small % to drop a superduperwarforged gear (if I understood the interview right) that'll be an upgrade to your raid gear. Keep in mind that the chances are getting it are supposedly very low, running raids will still be more effective for gearing, but there's always the small hope

They say they've learned from their mistake that we call WoD, and know content drought is a serious problem. We don't know if they'll be able to actually pull it off this expansion yet, it could go either way, but it has good potential

[Kolvarg]

Possible solution/workaround:

Create realms with special rulesets to please more hardcore players and group like-minded individuals.

For instance a realm where current expansion's content is necessarily progressive (require achievment of Highmaul before you can enter Blackrock Foundry) with slower exp, gold and drop rates, no catch up mechanics, no instant queue acessibility features, no heirlooms or boosts, no character transfers, no LFR or Normal raid difficulty (possibly no Heroic?), etc.

Would realms like these be wildly popular? Probably not. But it would create close small communities of like minded people who want the same from the game (which is honestly what we're lacking the most nowadays), who would take longer to consume the content and enjoy a more hardcore/commited approach to the game without removing enjoyment from the more casual players.

[Deleted]

some of us would love to have wow hardcore again but it wont work, todays playerbase dont have the time to invest in a slow progress system we once had.
Today's gamers are spoiled with instat rewarding and games beeing easy. its nothing they can do, they cant just cater to the veterans and let the rest of the millions go unheard.
You have to realize that we are a dying breed, and we want something that dont happen in todays games, not matter what title or genre you are looking at.

[Delaios]

I wanna say it's the rate of gear invalidation on live today. In Vanilla and TBC, content patches didn't give you free "catch-up" gear to invalidate prior raids in that same expansion like we do today. Basically, it's like we're seeing 3-4 expansions per actual expansion which is just way too fast.

Catching-up has been sped up far too much and right now it's at it's worst state. Late WotLK you could queue for heroic dungeons for a few hours and get maybe 1 or 2 items equivalent to the previous raiding tier. Now depending on which event is active you are in gear equivalent to the current normal mode raid tier. Unless you step up and go raid, you're essentially done with gearing up that character. In Wrath (and Cata and MoP) it would take weeks before you reached a point where only (normal or higher) raiding would get you better gear.

Even late MoP wasn't as bad as it is right now. Sure you could fill up most slots with 496 gear that you farmed on other characters. But that wasn't even enough to be able to enter SoO LFR.