The truth on how MMO-C in general seems to react to a new expansion over time following its launch:
It really seems to me that most people simply like the content when it's fresh, and then they get bored. Sounds natural to me.
The truth on how MMO-C in general seems to react to a new expansion over time following its launch:
It really seems to me that most people simply like the content when it's fresh, and then they get bored. Sounds natural to me.
I'm surprised you used paladin as your example here. I fell in love with Ret in Wrath because it was so much fun and it was definitely more than Crusader Strike & Divine Storm, which is closer to what it's been whittled down to in Legion. I'm also assuming you didn't try playing a feral druid. Aside from a couple of class/specs I'm struggling to think of any that were anywhere near as bad as they are in Legion. My action bars have never been as empty as they are in this expansion nor have I ever had to cycle through alts as much due to sheer boredom of the extremely limited rotations. I would love to have Wrath's class 'simplicity' back as I'd actually have more to do.
"We must now recognize that the greatest threat of freedom for us all is if we go back to eating ourselves out from within." - John Anderson
Legion is incredible for content. It's too bad it's incredibly weak for two pillars of the game: class design and loot.
Fixes: remove legendaries, turn them into equal ilvl epics and add their perks to baseline talents so leveling can have more variety. And add vendors that sell mythic 6-7 or heroic raid level gear after lots of grinding and add honor vendors back as well.
Originally Posted by High Overlord Saurfangi7-6700 @2.8GHz | Nvidia GTX 960M | 16GB DDR4-2400MHz | 1 TB Toshiba SSD| Dell XPS 15
I'm not disagreeing. I don't really like class design as a whole this expac. I like my spec but If I could go back to MoP I would. MoP took everything that was good from previous expacs and built on it. So many classes at that point achieved their class fantasy and had really fun good class design. For some reason Blizzard likes to fix things that aren't broken. The arms and fury warrior playstyle in MoP captures the fantasy for both specs perfectly.
It didn't have to be changed yet here we are with two really bland RNG specs that don't resemble there class fantasy. Fury is a wild beast...unless he's unlucky and doesn't get procs. Arms is patiently waiting to strike at the perfect moment...unless tactician doesn't proc. Meanwhile in Mop, you choose whenever you wanted to go wild as fury. You choose when you wanna blow your load as arms after building resources.
I hope one day they look at MoPs class design and say "shit, we gotta do that".
Woah calm down WOD better as PVP? Remember the coliseum thing? No ty
Also Raiding in Wod is fine like Legion, we still have no tier raid and already there are overturned fight eve if people have 3+ legs and 880 gear
ALTS in Legion are fine, there is no need to have alts at the same level of your main, focus your class instead of reroll the fotm,also on ptr there is a catch up for ak
Last edited by Ehuehuecopter; 2016-12-02 at 01:11 PM.
Blizzard already made bank on the xpac sales. Anything they get in between xpacs is gravy. Population decline isn't as big a deal to Blizzard as people think. As long as they can trigger the nostalgia and hype to make enough people buy the expac they're good.
They've given up on one expansion per year.
So: $60 expansion vs. 24 months at $15/month = $360 (or a bit less for people buying in larger blocks, but still). Sure, they're going to be thrilled to lose most of their income.
(I also strongly suspect value-added services are concentrated among players who stay subbed.)
I think it's more likely they've happy-talked cyclic subscriber behavior to try to paint a bad situation as favorably as they can.
"There is a pervasive myth that making content hard will induce players to rise to the occasion. We find the opposite. " -- Ghostcrawler
"The bit about hardcore players not always caring about the long term interests of the game is spot on." -- Ghostcrawler
"Do you want a game with no casuals so about 500 players?"
I respect your opinion, but I think you speak from more hardcore perspective and you think most people are like you. Most subs to WoW play this just to chill out, do some dungeons, dailies and pvp. In WoD they quickly hit the wall when all rewards was gated in content that require more dedication and organized group, only thing to progress was garrison and it also ended quickly, so they unsubscribed. Now you have many things to progress, like with artifact, I don't see it as a grind, because I get traits pretty regular by just playing a game 1-2 hours a day. So if player like WoW, he has always something to do.
Professions are also crafted for casual player, so he can make some money of his own. Feedback on professions was rather positive during the beta, so I don't know what are you talking about. And in beta they want to polish system that they already create (or scrap if it is complete failure), thing like you suggest go into "maybe we impletent this in next expansion?" category.
If they deliver with Legion patches with 7.2, 7.3 and smaller ones (7.2.5, 7.3.5) - (also I think we will get "medium" size 7.4 that will be a bridge to another expansion) in 2 years expansion (not 3+), it will be most supported expac in WoW history. We don't know for sure they deliver, but Ion talk very open about this - in Warlords they just went silent after launch. Yet you think it's still not enough. I think you have very unrealistic demands, so no wonder you are dissapointed. How many zone in patches they need to do satisfy you? 4? 5? They are doing this dude, but for next expansion, Legion will not stay forever. I know that in BC/Wrath we got more zones - but new ones are much more detailed, in BC era we just got huge wastelands with NPCs here and there. And what are this games that got so many updates and still didn't crush WoW?
And I say again - how do you want to keep people that just want level, "finish" main story and go straight to new game? There is no way. And there is no point. I don't know for others, but I don't care how many play as long as I see other players when I go into the open world - and zones are still packed, at least on my server.
Of course, as a business they want to make as much money as possible. I'm just making the point that Blizzard would still make plenty of money from WoW just from box sales alone. So while a sharp drop in subs looks bad and hurts their profits, they just have to try to keep things smooth as possible until the next xpac where they'll make a couple more hundred million dollars from nostalgic returners and current subscribers and addicts. All those paid character services, token sales and subscription fees in between are like a huge cherry on top.
I feel that if you ignore world quests - which are just repackaged daily quests - Legion doesn't have that much content. Mythic+ is very lazy content taking the regular dungeons and just messing around with some numbers. I would have liked to have seen an entirely new pvp mode aside from battlegrounds and arena, perhaps a duel queue system, or something like tol barad back, or anything creative like that. The whole prestige system has been a failure, artifact weapons have been a failure, they have put a magnifying glass on class/spec balance issues and made alt gameplay next to impossible.
Whether or not WoD was better depends on your priorities. I imagine for hardcore raiders WoD probably was better. For pvp it was better also. For casual Legion is probably better.
Personally I kind of enjoyed WoD to an extent.
Tier 0.5 was certainly NOT welfare in any sense. For the people that weren't raiding at that time (which is what 0.5 was aimed at) doing something like the Strat 45 minute run required more skills than most of the raids did. Anyone that thinks that was welfare just flat out wasn't there.
When challenging a Kzin, a simple scream of rage is sufficient. You scream and you leap.
Originally Posted by George CarlinOriginally Posted by Douglas Adams
WoW's combat rotations and front end gameplay is always good in retail these days but they miss the things that keep people playing, or that actually makes people really addicted. Giving out free items and rng slot machines to keep people entertained is good in the short term but even the most casual player sees through it after a while.
People need stuff to work for, a journey. When you play singleplayer games and use cheats or guides it cheapens the experience, makes it not feel as good. That's exactly what welfare is to most people, even if they don't understand it properly.
Welfare does two things to WoW. 1. It objectively cuts down the amount of content, as it's made obsolete/irrelevant. 2. Makes the journey feel less rewarding, as my cheat-boost example tries to point out.
I seriously cant remember the names of nearly anything in recent WoW expansions. It's all just so force fed and rubbish. Yet I can remember everything from the older wow's, even blues. The front-end gameplay in old wow is horrible (1 button rotations, class balance, spec balance etc the list goes on) but it felt meaningful/rewarding to even the average joe, which keeps people addicted.
If you work your ass off for an item and finally get it, it's a freaking HIGH. If you get a full set of epics just mailed to you, for 2 seconds you might care but it is really nothing. I bet if they hooked up a brain scan the dopamine release would be 1/100th of receiving a greatsword of horrid dreams, or sonic spear.
Mythic raiding and so forth is AMAZING in retail wow, but most people never do it or cant, so they are on the welfare train and just quit after a while.
Hahahahaha no.
You think Vanilla's upgrade-able dungeon sets was welfare? It was an incredibly long and hard quest chain and it wasn't even "strong" relative to other items. ZG and AQ20 had improved loot tables but still wasn't amazing relative to the 40 man raids, even first level MC/Ony unless you got bloodvine and other stuff, but it was bits and bobs - You still had to actually complete something reasonably hard for the average player, whereas catchup mechanics and welfare from WOTLK TOC onwards is literally epics for showing up that are better then 1-2 entire raid tiers.
Point 2 and 3 are imperative.
Average Joe loves the idea of welfare and freebies but after a short while even realizes it's meaningless. Why even bother farming a dungeon when next patch they'l get something way better for less effort. Most people don't raid Mythic so don't even need the high ilvl - they just need to wait for a patch then skip the content anyway, then complain there is nothing to do or quit before then.
Seriously it happens every single expansion.
Cata: DS comes out, everyone is boosted to 384 LFR and then complains there is nothing to do, most people never even did tier 11, crafting or anything properly.
MoP: Constant LFR farm for average Joe makes each tier almost useless entertainment to them, then comes Timeless Isle + SoO LFR which boosts everyone to 520+, everyone complains there is nothing to do but never even beat first tier on anything.
WoD: Baleful comes in like a wrecking ball and everyone complains there is nothing to do + 700 pvp gear, most people again never even did Highmaul. Mythic dungeons are cool but essentially useless for majority who afk'd 700 ilvl.
Now the hardcore and top end community have semi-valid complaints about content drought because they actually beat stuff, small groups at very top beat it ASAP but they are impossible to cater to.
Black temple came out may 2007 and sunwell in march 2008, in all that time I only saw few complaints from the very top end who said "need content" (they are so far ahead it's impossible to cater to them) everyone else was working on T4/T5.
Blizzard cant make content fast enough for average joe no company can, so they artificially gate LFR for weeks and weeks, but it's still not enough.
Most people quit because bored - "there's no magic/charm left" = IMHO which was the feeling of reward / meaningfulness.
Last edited by Daffan; 2016-12-03 at 01:10 PM.
Content drought is a combination of catchup mechanics and no new content.