What Ruined World of Warcraft

[HordeFanboy]

Activision. Casualisation. Pruning. RNG.
Mop was the last good exp. Legion and wod are garbage for a new Facebook mobile games player generation.

[Kithelle]

I love this argument. It's so bad yet it keeps being used.

When WoD came out, WoW was already 10 years old. It was already incredibly old yet it shot back up to 10 million subscribers briefly because people were misled into thinking the game would be great again. Naturally, they were wrong and the game quickly shot down in subscribers because WoD was awful.

The game is also not almost 18 years old, did you fail your Math classes? 2017-2004 = 13 years.

Yeah typos can happen...especially when one is tired....I edited it as soon as I noticed.

But yeah...so I guess everyone likes to do the same thing over and over and over for over a decade am I right?

I guess you eat the same cheeseburger, steak, or salad every single day of your life for dinner...am I right?

[Whatever Dude]

Yeah typos can happen...especially when one is tired....I edited it as soon as I noticed.

But yeah...so I guess everyone likes to do the same thing over and over and over for over a decade am I right?

I guess you eat the same cheeseburger, steak, or salad every single day of your life for dinner...am I right?

Cool post. Do you have anything worthwhile to say or are we done here?

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

The fact that it's no longer an RPG, and it doesn't feel like an MMO except when you're doing raids/dungeons. Also for whatever reason they decided to make it very similar to Diablo 3, which in all honesty is an awful game.

[Eurhetemec]

I'm tired of people that constantly "blame the player" for this. It is not my fault or the fault of "nostalgia" that I simply find some zones to be more immersive than others. I have no interest in going through WoD content again, it's awful, and it's a huge chore when I have to level through it. I couldn't care less about Legion areas. They aren't part of a world, they're just zones in a game. But I actively, out of my own volition, choose and enjoy to go through Mulgore, Eversong, Elwynn, and the Barrens, over and over again, because I legitimately enjoy those areas and appreciate them as places in a real world.

It might not be your "fault", because that implies you did something wrong, but it is, to a significant extent, specific to you.

I do completely understand what you're describing. Some zones in WoW feel more like "places", and others feel like, for want of a better word "computer game levels". The trouble is, I don't believe that you can really claim that the Vanilla world was strong on this, and every expansion since worse, without going into deeply subjective and personal territory.

I think if you take a step back, and look at things more objectively (and no-one can be fully objective about art, which is what this is), you will see there has been ebb and flow here.

Vanilla's zones are variable in quality, but did tend to have a strong sense of "place". Very few of them felt completely artificial - but a few did. Coming from DAoC, as I did, which had significantly more "naturalistic" zone design, I felt like, for example, Un'goro crater, Silithus, and oddly, Redridge, all felt rather "fake" and artificial even by the standards of the time.

TBC has the same issue but made more extreme. You also have the confusing situation where some zones are visually and atmospherically amazing, but really don't seem like places, like the Netherstorm. I find it the least "real feeling" of the zones (and not because of the nature of what's happening there, just the way it's designed), but at the same time it's extremely impressive.

Wrath went back to a slightly more naturalistic design, but by then we see changes in the way the game works that begin to move away from that sort of feeling of place. The zones are large, but some feel far more together in design than others (Stormpeaks has cool lore, but feels very inconsistent as a zone, for my money, for example).

Cata almost completely abandoned naturalism and introduced immediacy. A huge, stark changing from Wrath and what was before. The excuse of the Cataclysm is used to re-work zones, and in many cases they lose much of their character, and the "ITS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW" is a pervasive theme that was not really present in Vanilla-Wrath. In Vanilla-Wrath, many zones have a kind of timelessness to them - some stuff is clearly recent, but the general vibe is that a lot of things have been happening for years, and will continue happening. Cataclysm rejects this, and rejigs the game as if the Cataclysm literally happened days ago. The entire old-world and Cata zones are like this, and it's... problematic. Combined with the extreme lack of naturalism in the new zones (which instead are rather exaggerated even by WoW standards), and only really Vash'jr stands out as an atmospheric and effective zone.

MoP tried to roll this back a bit, but unfortunately the new art style and "Fantasy China/Japan" deal means it has an unfortunate cut & paste deal going on, and yes, that leads to a decrease in naturalism and some of that Cata immediacy is still there, but far less problematic because it's not impacting old-world zones.

WoD is beautiful, in many cases, and many of the zones have the potential to feel very much like places, but the problem isn't the design of the zones themselves, I'd say, trying to be objective, it's the gameplay. If you took all the gameplay out and NPCs and so on, I feel like WoD's Draenor would feel as or more "like a place" than TBC's (except Tanaan and that other awful forgettable jungle zone). But you can't, they are there, and they guide your experience of the game, and that is what robs it of some of the "place-ness" (I can't remember the Latin for "place" to put -itas on the end lol).

Legion very much attempts to bring back "zone as place", but with mixed results - where it does work, people complain of frustrating design (Highmountain), and where it doesn't work (Val'Sharah, imho), there's just a vague feeling of not-quite-right-ness. Suramar, which you poo-poo, is a mixed bag particularly. Stuff like the under-tunnels and so on feels GREAT in terms of place-ness. Those are some of the best open-world tunnels in WoW history (and Withered Army Training makes good use of a section of them). Suramar City is also pretty decent, in that it actually seems to have places within it, but it's a little underdeveloped in that there's a bit too much C&P due to it's massive size.

Anyway, TLDR I don't think we can really, if trying even slightly to be objective, say that this has consistent gotten worse. It hit it's absolute nadir, by miles, with Cata, and since then has gradually improved.

[Mojo03]

Different day.

Different way to argue about the exact same thing people argue about everyday.

The game always sucked! All those Everquest and Ultima people they hired ruined the game and the company culture.

[Eurhetemec]

MMO-C released some stats recently that showed only 1.8 million active players. Probably slightly higher subs than that. 2-2.5 million at most.

Dude. No.

Don't repeat lies.

The guy claiming this had to publicly apologise and retract his claim in multiple threads. Now you should edit your post and say "Ooops I was talking total shit". I know you won't, but the ask the guy who said that - rda. Those figures were not population figures at all.

[Rainyhealz]

I agree. Anyone who opposes clearly hasn't played throughout all the years. For me, the biggest mistake is making everybody the hero. Going from being just a simple soldier to a hero with a legendary weapon that is so special but given to all is just the worst. Making everyone special makes nobody special. Standing out by working harder at the game is no longer an option. I understand hand holding the casuals is a smart business tactic, but something is wrong when you have to hide subs numbers. Yet the polls are filled with disagreeing people who can't face the truth.

[Kithelle]

Cool post. Do you have anything worthwhile to say or are we done here?

Yeah...I understand...just dismiss anything that doesn't fit in with your vanilla zealot agenda. You guys already lie through your teeth...why not just pretend facts don't exist in your little fantasy land as well.

[Shibito]

90% of the WoW community won't agree with you. WoTLK was the bomb. From Cataclysm it went downhill...

90% of the people who loved wotlk started wow then aka kids

[Eurhetemec]

The game always sucked! All those Everquest and Ultima people they hired ruined the game and the company culture.

Hahahahaha that takes me back.

"All those EQ devs they hired ruined the game!" was an argument used about Trials of Atlantis for Dark Age of Camelot in 2003.

Except, um, ToA did kind of ruin DAoC, but for very different reasons. It turned a game focused on RvR, with a short PvE grind to max-level, max-gear, into a game where, after max-level, you still had a totally massive PvE grind (requiring extremely large raids at many points) for abilities, and then tons more PvE camping and grinding for Artifacts and ToA-stat gear, just to be mildly competitive in RvR, so completely changed the focus and further, the massive abilities ToA granted (which, despite being from massive PvE stuff, were all oriented towards RvR) kind of ruined the feel of RvR itself.

90% of the people who loved wotlk started wow then aka kids

Bollocks, frankly. I started WoW in beta and loved WotLK, and literally every player I knew who had played since year 1 liked WotLK. The only people I've heard sneer at it were a few who started in TBC (and they mostly disliked changed to PvP), and some who didn't start until later Cata/MoP.

[deniter]

Yes...because the game being fresh and new back then and now has nothing to do with it?

The game is almost a decade and a half old and still going strong with a sub based system when most mmos have moved on to f2p.

They have gotten rid of everything prior 2010 and enhanced graphics, animations, etc. almost in every single expansion after that. So in a way the game is no older than 7 years at this point.

[Echocho]

There's nothing wrong in different difficulty settings, but the entire game should reflect the setting i choose.

That's very true. Difficulty isn't a choice, it's a plus menu. You still have to deal with a lot of the easier difficulties regardless of your choice.
The world has no difficulty to choose from so it's easy by default.
If you choose heroic as your raid difficulty you still have to do normal or even LFR first (and parallell) due to gear upgrades and lack of a loot lockout.
And dungeons, it's a mess right now. As much as I love the idea of mythic plus I think every other difficulty should be removed and we should be able to set the m+ ourselves up to the maximum we've completed on our account.

[Whatever Dude]

Dude. No.

Don't repeat lies.

The guy claiming this had to publicly apologise and retract his claim in multiple threads. Now you should edit your post and say "Ooops I was talking total shit". I know you won't, but the ask the guy who said that - rda. Those figures were not population figures at all.

What? I'm pretty sure I saw that 1.8 figure on the front page of MMO-C. It was talking about active players for something. I never said it was a completely accurate representation of the playerbase, which is why I bumped up my prediction of the current state of subs.

Yeah...I understand...just dismiss anything that doesn't fit in with your vanilla zealot agenda. You guys already lie through your teeth...why not just pretend facts don't exist in your little fantasy land as well.

I'm not a vanilla zealot. Just don't like you hand-waiving any argument away with the game being old.

[RoKPaNda]

You missed the point by a mile. Prior it indeed was "raid this way or FUCK OFF." but there was a full length MMO game before you even reached the "hmm, should i commit to schedules of some raiding guild or not" -part.

As you said, raiding was a very niche activity - it still is. But nowadays you don't have much choice since they have stripped down everything else but raiding in its various flavors, and added few facebook -like minigames and a story driven single player game to give an illusion of vast content from past years.

There's nothing wrong in different difficulty settings, but the entire game should reflect the setting i choose. And raiding as a feature suits very poorly for a casual gamer. In pre-wotlk WoW there was months, even years of content for someone playing a few hours a day, and none of it had nothing to do with raids. Now everyone has the same, limited amount of content they can play through in few months, then either quit until next expansion or do it again on dozen of other characters.

The game IS better in many ways, mostly technical and artistic areas, but it's so small and non-MMO'ish that many of us older players don't even bother anymore.

Ahh the ol' move the goalposts strategy.

There was most definitely not "months or years of content for someone playing a few hours a day." - That's such a joke. While for most of my time playing WoW I've been on the cutting edge I've always had casual friends and one of their biggest frustrations was "Oh, leveling takes forever. I wish I was level cap faster so I could do the cool stuff you're doing." - And then they'd finally get to level cap and we'd run some dungeons and .... that was it. That was where their endgame abruptly ended in Vanilla. In BC they had badge gear and Karazhan at least. And that's how it always was, casual endgame would end abruptly and everything else was raid or fuck off. I don't know where you're getting this idea that there was some full length game before that point? Leveling has, since BC, been go collect 10 boar asses as busy work to delay you from getting to the meat of the game. And once you're at level cap you run a couple dungeons, okay there's your endgame! Run a couple heroic dungeons for a week, time to start an alt. Basically what you're erroneously claiming is the case now.

Heck they made an endgame out of dungeons now. I've got a group of 3 casual friends and their two children that run nothing but M+ now. That's more than they've ever had to do. There's more to do at endgame than ever before, there's more raid paths available, and that makes the higher end raiding better as well. PvE is so much better than it used to be. Leveling is what it's been since the first expansion.

Activision.

Oh my, it's been a decade now and people still don't grasp that this isn't Activision. This is the path that Blizzard set down forever ago. Every single game Blizzard has ever made has had the same complaints about dumbing down and casualization compared to the game before it.

[Whatever Dude]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/...ology-DLC-602?

Here's the figure. It says 1.8 million players are active this month in the US and EU combined. Doesn't take into account Asia, but a subscription is a month long, so this seems as accurate as we can get without getting sub numbers directly from Blizzard.

Counting Asia, it's probably at 3 million or so subs. Still down a lot from the 5.5 figure we last saw during WoD. There's really nothing to suggest the numbers have done anything but drop from the 5.5. figure officially reported.

[Allenseiei]

I'm going to call bullshit but think what you want.

I dont really care if you believe or not. The fact that vanilla bosses are only a fraction of the current raiding content is still there.

[Kithelle]

What? I'm pretty sure I saw that 1.8 figure on the front page of MMO-C. It was talking about active players for something. I never said it was a completely accurate representation of the playerbase, which is why I bumped up my prediction of the current state of subs.




I'm not a vanilla zealot. Just don't like you hand-waiving any argument away with the game being old.

The game is old...and is a contributing factor but not once did I say "Warcraft doesn't have the subs it used to just because it's old" there are many factors but you can't just shake your head and say no that age isn't a factor at all.

[Pull My Finger]

"There was a time when loot was exciting instead of generic, dungeons were hard, leveling was part of the experience (and not a 3 day chore to endgame), community was king, and inconvenience just lead to good memories. Now it's just a lobby to pug raid in for ever increasing boring stat increases on forgettable items, with a Facebook game style treadmill on the side.

The sad state of MMORPGS really. I cross my fingers that we see what Dark Souls did to to the action adventure genre in MMO land. Bring back the difficulty, remove the hand holding, and let you experience the world again instead of chase after mindless quest markers doing piss easy content."

-Equestria



Do you agree?

No, I don't agree at all. And I have very little respect for this kind of pathetic and whiny soapboxing. People like that are the cancer of gaming. Fuck them all. When self-important, unable-to-grow up nerd assholes like that finally find themselves some other obsession to get hung up on, we wll be able to make gaming great again.

[Deleted]

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/...ology-DLC-602?

Here's the figure. It says 1.8 million players are active this month in the US and EU combined. Doesn't take into account Asia, but a subscription is a month long, so this seems as accurate as we can get without getting sub numbers directly from Blizzard.

Counting Asia, it's probably at 3 million or so subs. Still down a lot from the 5.5 figure we last saw during WoD. There's really nothing to suggest the numbers have done anything but drop from the 5.5. figure officially reported.

That article says and i quote "This data sample contains 1.8 million US and EU players active in the last month"
It says nowhere that number is the ammount of players currently playing the game. It just says the data is from 1.8 million players.

It's near impossible to know the number of active players, otherwise someone would have already done it and it would be pretty well known.