Classic World of Warcraft Discussion [Megathread]

[Vineri]

...yet you can make the exact same argument against them. Had the QoL features not been added, WoW may have lost ground to other MMOs which did have QoL features. And as much as it's cool to hate on retail WoW in this thread, none of us would be posting here right now if the game had died off during Cata.

No you can't make the exact same argument argument against them.

Subs did decrease when early LFD QoL features were implemented. Saying they would have decreased anyways without QoL requires a magic crystal ball, none to date known to be reliable. Did decrease, and may have decreased anyways are 2 very separate things.

Subs did decrease at a specific moment when certain "features" went into play. Your speculation is just a bunch of "what if's", which is not objective. Your opinion.

[Kyanion]

Subs did decrease when early LFD QoL features were implemented.

This is where you are making the disconnect. You do not KNOW if that is the cause. You are just assuming that is the cause.

[Vineri]

This is where you are making the disconnect. You do not KNOW if that is the cause. You are just assuming that is the cause.

As stated, sub decrease coincided with QoL features, to dumb the game down. There is not a direct connect, but they occurred at the same time. A big coincidence!

[Kyanion]

As stated, sub decrease coincided with QoL features, to dumb the game down. There is not a direct connect, but they occurred at the same time. A big coincidence!

Anything to fit your narrative right?

[shimerra]

Subs did decrease at a specific moment when certain "features" went into play. Your speculation is just a bunch of "what if's", which is not objective. Your opinion.

As stated, sub decrease coincided with QoL features, to dumb the game down. There is not a direct connect, but they occurred at the same time. A big coincidence!

Do you even read your own writing? Try not acting like your own opinion is fact when you attempt to call others out for that.

Saying that subs decreased because of those features requires the same magic crystal ball. Lucky for us you apparently seem to have it so /thread right?

[Vineri]

Do you even read your own writing? Try not acting like your own opinion is fact when you attempt to call others out for that.

Saying that subs decreased because of those features requires the same magic crystal ball. Lucky for us you apparently seem to have it so /thread right?

They happened at the same time. Saying subs would have decrease anyways as a result of no QoL features is baseless.

[Kyanion]

Do you even read your own writing? Try not acting like your own opinion is fact when you attempt to call others out for that.

Saying that subs decreased because of those features requires the same magic crystal ball. Lucky for us you apparently seem to have it so /thread right?

That guy cracks me up so much. He's made the thread quite enjoyable the past few days.

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They happened at the same time. Saying subs would have decrease anyways as a result of no QoL features is baseless.

And right on time.

[Vineri]

Why the game lost its sub? Because the game is 12 years old. You are 12 years older today. Just as the playerbase changes, the market changes as well. Times change right?

Move on guys. This is really boring, especially when people are bashing LFR and other stuff random stuff; that makes no sense.

If it is boring, please stop reading this thread.

I find Legacy far more engaging than current retail WoW. I understand some people like current WoW - I'm OK with that. Conversely you would not like anyone going into "your" threads to complain about it being boring, would you? A good deal don't like LFD / LFR. You like such stuff, I'm happy for you. even though I don't like it.

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I think wanting to draw conclusions about the feeling of a design-change from the immediate feedback is not always helpful.

We can interpret the data in very different ways. Even change how we interpret that stuff.

In Cata I thought it were the noobs that left when dungeons were hard. That may be true to an extent - but nowadays I see the problem more in the new design decisions no longer meshing well with tight-tuning. If you have dungeongroups that vary extremely widely in ability and are expected to succeed tight tuning will be a disaster.
But if you look at MOP and it's abysmally easy dungeons - they are not engaging enough so even more quit.

In the overall arch of WoW, its changes and its sub-numbers I see two thing that affected it the most.
One is age - self-explanatory.
The other is the first impression of the game that imo got worse all the time.
That became only clear after having played vanilla again. Nostalrius was unbelievably well tuned.
Yes, the game was mechanically less complex so yes the skill-ceiling is much higher now and mechanically more difficult, but if you are expected to beat something, it has to be doable by pretty much everyone.
Vanilla relied much more on white damage - slow abilitys. You could not take as much effect one on one with a mob. Your character acted more like an equalizer between skilled and bad players. The game was much tighter tuned so even if you were skilled even pulling two or three mobs was often deadly.

That tight tuning was imo the most interesting part of vanilla explicitly and over time it was all watered down, especially at low levels.
I only started my warrior alt in BC and when I tried it on Nostalrius is was like night and day - so much harder. BC was still engaging for me - but there was a distinct change and imo for the worse which got worse and worse over time.
I think too much player-agency in character performance is not a good fit in a character-driven mmo like WoW. Especially if you combine it with trying to make everything more accessible.

There are more factors in there that affect it and I think difficulty are very direct changes that affect Sub-numbers.
I know many people that quit at the start of wotlk because Naxx was a f'ucking joke. They never returned as far as I know. That explains to me the half a million slump at the start of 2009. The change for harder stuff in Cata had a similar effect imo.
But the change with LFD was not nearly as direct. I thought at the start that it was a great new tool too. I realized the dramatic effect it had on my playstyle halfway through Cata and talked with friends about it. some agreed, many laughed at it. Many people in my friendslist quit and only ever came back for very short times in the future.
I myself pretty much resorted to only running raids in MOP (logging in twice a week - yay -.-) and completely quit shortly after the start of WOD.

A community is something you build. Changes like LFD are not like an earthquake that destroys almost everything, but turns the ground on top of which it was built into quicksand into which community was slowly sliding away into.

I think many people could not say what exactly made them leave - they choose the next best scapegoat - be it hard dungeons/raids or easy dungeons/raids or LFR or garrisons or no longer being in dalaran or shop-mounts or content-droughts or whatever else.
But perhaps it was just that they lost something that was holding them in the game.

Whatever, enough rambling about my opinion of wotlk overall and LFD sucking donkeyballs.

Great post, thanks for taking the time!

Great quote you made in GREEN. LOL, awesome quote, beyond great.

Something lost explains a lot. WoW is not even similar to the game it once was.

[Relapses]

They happened at the same time. Saying subs would have decrease anyways as a result of no QoL features is baseless.

For the sake of argument, say there was another large MMO released around the same time that WotLK was... at the height of WoW's popularity. Thematically, WoW and this other game are identical. However, this game features a LFD tool and is widely advertised against WoW due to this feature. WoW then loses hundreds and thousands -- even millions -- of subscribers as they all jump ship to the new MMO on the block with this sweet, awesome LFD tool that you can't use in WoW. In this scenario, not only does WoW lose ground to its competition but it would likely be forced to adapt a version of the LFD anyway just to stay afloat.

Your argument only works in a world where it's universally accepted that players want to sit around for hours at a fucking time making groups for dungeons. When you account that the recent trend of gamers seeking to get their gaming fixes on smaller time schedules, this idea sticks out like a sore thumb. I won't argue that there are players who did prefer it, but I can't help but surmise they are in a great minority.

Moving on, with WoW being the premier subscription based MMO it has to be the trendsetter for these changes. They have to make the moves before the competition. If market data is showing that players want tools like the LFD then it makes sense that WoW is the first to implement them. If they don't, they can potentially lose out to the competition. And as much as you may dislike the LFD tool, there is absolutely nothing which supports your baseless correlation between subscriber losses and its introduction. You're drawing conclusions where there isn't anything to be made.

This discussion isn't about the black and white -- {x} happened, resulting in {y} subscriber losses -- it's about the innumerable shades of grey in between which nobody on this forum will ever be able to accurately quantify. There are simply too many mitigating factors which are far more likely to be the reason for the subscriber losses that it's borderline insanity to sit here for page after page shoving this warped narrative that QoL tools ruined the game down everybody's throats.

[Kyanion]

For the sake of argument, say there was another large MMO released around the same time that WotLK was... at the height of WoW's popularity. Thematically, WoW and this other game are identical. However, this game features a LFD tool and is widely advertised against WoW due to this feature. WoW then loses hundreds and thousands -- even millions -- of subscribers as they all jump ship to the new MMO on the block with this sweet, awesome LFD tool that you can't use in WoW. In this scenario, not only does WoW lose ground to its competition but it would likely be forced to adapt a version of the LFD anyway just to stay afloat.

Your argument only works in a world where it's universally accepted that players want to sit around for hours at a fucking time making groups for dungeons. When you account that the recent trend of gamers seeking to get their gaming fixes on smaller time schedules, this idea sticks out like a sore thumb. I won't argue that there are players who did prefer it, but I can't help but surmise they are in a great minority.

Moving on, with WoW being the premier subscription based MMO it has to be the trendsetter for these changes. They have to make the moves before the competition. If market data is showing that players want tools like the LFD then it makes sense that WoW is the first to implement them. If they don't, they can potentially lose out to the competition. And as much as you may dislike the LFD tool, there is absolutely nothing which supports your baseless correlation between subscriber losses and its introduction. You're drawing conclusions where there isn't anything to be made.

This discussion isn't about the black and white -- {x} happened, resulting in {y} subscriber losses -- it's about the innumerable shades of grey in between which nobody on this forum will ever be able to accurately quantify. There are simply too many mitigating factors which are far more likely to be the reason for the subscriber losses that it's borderline insanity to sit here for page after page shoving this warped narrative that QoL tools ruined the game down everybody's throats.

Pretty cut and dry. I can't wait to see how this gets spun by Vineri and the other people holding on to this idea that QoL changes doomed the game and nothing else was a factor.

[Vineri]

For the sake of argument, say there was another large MMO released around the same time that WotLK was... at the height of WoW's popularity. Thematically, WoW and this other game are identical. However, this game features a LFD tool and is widely advertised against WoW due to this feature. WoW then loses hundreds and thousands -- even millions -- of subscribers as they all jump ship to the new MMO on the block with this sweet, awesome LFD tool that you can't use in WoW. In this scenario, not only does WoW lose ground to its competition but it would likely be forced to adapt a version of the LFD anyway just to stay afloat.

No such game existed that had the height of WoW's popularity. Runes of Magic had a auto-PVP finder, so did Warhammer. They were flops. So why did WoW need to sacrifice community to make PVE group finders .. cross realm, no less? To beat the competition? What competition?

If anything it showed existing competion a case study model on what "not" to do when you are a success.

[Deleted]

1.5 million views for an 11 year old game.

It's just nostalgia, right?

[Kyanion]

1.5 million views for an 11 year old game.

It's just nostalgia, right?

Oh man now view count on a post is super important! Grasp at those straws!

[Relapses]

No such game existed that had the height of WoW's popularity. Runes of Magic had a auto-PVP finder, so did Warhammer. They were flops. So why did WoW need to sacrifice community to make PVE group finders .. cross realm, no less? To beat the competition? What competition?

If anything it showed existing competion a case study model on what "not" to do when you are a success.

(Since you've largely ignored everything I wrote, I'll just do a tl,dr of my last post)

...the point of the analogy was to prove that if WoW didn't implement them, another MMO probably would have. And at the time when these features were introduced, WoW stood to lose a lot more being behind the curve rather than ahead of it. The QoL features you loathe so much may very well be the only reason the game is still around today. Any correlation you're making between subscription losses and the introduction of QoL features are completely unrelated since there's no way for you (or anybody else) to prove any singular feature was the root cause of the game's fall from popularity.

[Deleted]

Oh man now view count on a post is super important!

Yes it is.

If you realized how fucking lazy most people really are, you'd realize how important it is.

It's that empathy gap again.

Empathy. Come and find me there.

[Vineri]

...the point of the analogy was to prove that if WoW didn't implement them, another MMO probably would have.

< SNIP >

A bad analogy since the competition didn't happen. Probably would have happened, could have happened, should have happened, but did not happen. Actually there was no evidence at the time that a different MMORPG would have implemented them. Bad research teams at Blizzard, if this is what you are asserting.

[Relapses]

Yes it is.

If you realized how fucking lazy most people really are, you'd realize how important it is.

It's that empathy gap again.

Empathy. Come and find me there.

It's a 1,500 page thread that's been active for more than four months. Every time somebody reads through the thread, it registers a view. So of course it's going to have a ludicrous number of views. It isn't really indicative of anything other than this being a popular thread in the community.

[Vineri]

It's a 1,500 page thread that's been active for more than four months. Every time somebody reads through the thread, it registers a view. So of course it's going to have a ludicrous number of views. It isn't really indicative of anything other than this being a popular thread in the community.

Yet some folks keep coming back to post, even though they dislike the idea of Legacy. Know anyone like that?

[Deleted]

It's a 1,500 page thread that's been active for more than four months. Every time somebody reads through the thread, it registers a view. So of course it's going to have a ludicrous number of views. It isn't really indicative of anything other than this being a popular thread in the community.

That lack of empathy will be your own undoing.

[Kyanion]

Yet some folks keep coming back to post, even though they dislike the idea of Legacy. Know anyone like that?

What you mean you wish this thread was a circle jerk of pro-Legacy people and that the thread would be half the size it is now? Yeah how dare people have opinions that you don't share! /gasp

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That lack of empathy will be your own undoing.

Is empathy the new buzz word of the day? Do we all start yelling and clapping when you use it? You don't even know how to use it properly.