What Ruined World of Warcraft

[Will]

Ffs we get a post with this same rhetoric every few months...

[Hellrime]

What honestly made the game fun was the exclusivity of the content, I say that and abhor the nostalgia crowd. Although my reference comes from playing on a Vanilla server recently. I noticed that I was engaged consistently because shit could actually kill me and the dungeons were actually difficult and that was the standard difficulty. I compared that to playing on live servers, I'm never in any real danger, I'm getting all this free gear, and I just don't feel pulled into the story. I just killed this universal threat with 25 dimwits who stood in crap and did suboptimal dps.

What made me want to be good at raiding, my class, etc... was seeing the red variant of the armor from Icecrown Citadel, I had to have it. I spent hours looking up strats, perfected my rotations, studied the best and most efficient strategies for achieving optimal dps, etc... In addition, the world felt alive, I built a reputation on my server as being an good player, granted not the best, but I was brought on runs with some of the top guilds. Now if someone is a bad, you can't tell until they're in the group and sometimes it is just better to carry them as you will lose good players when taking the time to replace them. There is no incentive to grow as a player.

Once you take out the community and the need to group or any real sense of actual danger, you kind of lose what makes a good MMO. The vast majority of players in game today wouldn't have made it one hour on the Vanilla servers, everything could kill your character and after two deaths they would be screaming and kicking.

- - - Updated - - -

Yep. ToC ruined it.

If ToC was the ONLY raid you did in WotLK then I would agree. Icecrown Citadel was one of the best raid instances of all time, probably in any MMO. Ulduar being ahead of ICC, and Black Temple being just slightly behind Icecrown Citadel.

[blackblade]

oh ye the imfamous difficulty of vanilla: dispel a curse

More like know enough people to survive the first pull.

[Hotsforyou]

LFR and LFG were the primary killers of WoW. All they do is make it so you never have to truly interact with people to get things done. hit a button, que up repeat rotation and done. Move on to the next thing. Prior to that you have to find a group, travel across the land with them to get to the dungeon, work on CC assign people things to do. It was fun.

Once LFG dropped, i lost all interest in 5 mans. 5 mans up until that point were my primary time spender in the game. Loved them. Now i can't stand them because of the GO GO GO mentality. Yes, that even applies to M+ dungeons.

[Rainyhealz]

I've raided every expansion and sold carries during legion and wod. I've gotten many realmfirst mythic achievements. Canceled sub and went to a vanilla server. Vanilla raiding is by far more difficult than legion. Even the dungeons are insane. If one person ruins a cc on a mob, it can guarantee a wipe. Mana is much more scarce. Game is a joke. They even had Conan at blizzcon

[Lasombria]

Instead of flocking to vanilla servers, it'd be interesting to see more people who feel the game has lost its sense of challenge do more recent content on the live servers while giving up the kind of hand-holding crutch they decry and that wasn't there early on: DBM, WeakAuras, LFG/LFR, that kind of thing. Surely players as elite as they want us to know they are can rise to that kind of challenge, right?

(I'm not even being purely sarcastic here. There are guilds that impose level and ilevel caps and do previous expansions' raiding in a good approximation within the current game of how it was being at the level cap then. It would certainly be a lot tougher to do current content that way. But that's what challenges are for.)

[Rainyhealz]

Flocking to a vanilla server is more challenging than that. That's why people flock there

[-Skye]

I think for me it's just my age, as I'm getting older MMO's are interesting me less and less. As much as I want to get lost in a big epic fantasy world and ignore my boring real life which doesn't engage me that much i'm finding it more and more difficult. I'm not sure if that's something to do with the game, or with me. I know many "older" players though who still enjoy the game as much as they used to so I'm guessing it's me

[Duckypoo]

Cataclysm. The changes it brought made almost all of my friends and guild members quit. =(

[voidillusion]

Instead of flocking to vanilla servers, it'd be interesting to see more people who feel the game has lost its sense of challenge do more recent content on the live servers while giving up the kind of hand-holding crutch they decry and that wasn't there early on: DBM, WeakAuras, LFG/LFR, that kind of thing. Surely players as elite as they want us to know they are can rise to that kind of challenge, right?

(I'm not even being purely sarcastic here. There are guilds that impose level and ilevel caps and do previous expansions' raiding in a good approximation within the current game of how it was being at the level cap then. It would certainly be a lot tougher to do current content that way. But that's what challenges are for.)

Addons have very little to do with anything, it's more about mechanics and game design issues. Aoe being scarce and expensive, mana being taxed, threat being demanding, and a damage to Health pool ratio very different than what you have now is what really differs, not addons, specially when you had addons and still have since very early stages of the game.

[huth]

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.

The game has, save for regular spikes whenever new content is released, steadily lost subs ever since WotLK at a pretty constant rate. Come up with a better explanation.

The argument keeps getting used because it's backed up by all known statistics.

[Eurhetemec]

Addons have very little to do with anything, it's more about mechanics and game design issues. Aoe being scarce and expensive, mana being taxed, threat being demanding, and a damage to Health pool ratio very different than what you have now is what really differs, not addons, specially when you had addons and still have since very early stages of the game.

That's still only about 30% of the truth, though all that absolutely was a factor.

What was a huge factor in Vanilla was, and we don't often talk about this, was gear was scarce and most people had shit gear, really shit. I mean, people raided BWL, even AQ40, partially in blues. Successfully - we were one of the cutting-edge guilds on the server and had content "on farm" (in the sense of regularly clearing it, and so on), but simply churn in players and characters meant people being in shit gear continued.

That doesn't mean the game was better. Essentially people were just subject to massive RNG (like people complain about with Legion, but, really, much much worse). Even with systems like DKP, what dropped and when was RNG, and thus you were at it's whims. You could try and save for something, but it might never drop, or the guild might get annoyed with you "hoarding" your DKP or the like.

I was often the beneficiary of RNG. People complained at me - I got a lot of lucky drops and/or stuff at exactly the right time, and it made the game easier and more pleasant. But most people weren't, and it was pretty obvious.

If everyone had even blue gear for most dungeons, or was in a full set of the Tier gear from the raid below (or even purples of the same ilvl), a lot of that content would have been a lot more trivial. Especially if we all had all the potions and so on that we needed.

[ryanmahaffe]

Lets see

I GOT IT
People who have been playing for a long time wouldn't enjoy the game as much no matter what. People are trying to find a reason to blame the game for their burnout

I consider Legion the best expansion WoW has had, but I am not playing it often, because I am pretty burnt out.

[God Save The King]

I tend to disagree. I found Classic, and especially TBC, to be the absolute bottom of the game, which has only improved since. They are essentially the embodiment of ideals in that quote. I think for there to be something that ruined WoW, WoW would need to be ruined. Clearly it's far from that. It may have been ruined for an individual, whose reasoning can vary wildly, but I'm sure there are some old players who whined about LK and quit because of what the quote suggests.

[Zentail]

"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?

I don't agree with you in most ways, but let me explain my reasoning for each one. I'm just going to set a preface of this: I've played since Classic, raided a bit in Classic, but started hardcore in BC+. I went back down to casual in Cata, Hardcore in MoP, and casual since. In periods of casual, I still once in a while did the hardest difficulty stuff because I wanted to.

1. Loot was exciting instead of generic.
This, I completely agree with. When Legendaries were super rare drops off final raid bosses, that's when I felt they shined. Bosses were hard, the loot was good, and a chance at incredible loot. You seeing someone with a legendary made you just look at them in awe. I remember when I first saw someone with the warglaives in PvP and just thought to myself, "I'm dead."

I also didn't object to the questlines that made it so everyone got a legendary. They weren't hard, no. However, everyone got a reward, it required a little grinding, and it felt like a legendary. I miss legendaries feeling legendary. The power difference between having it and not was massive. I did love that. Legendaries now are totally just epic items and nothing more. They're also incredibly RNG based which wouldn't bug me if there wasn't a slew of legendaries we could get. Some of them being good and others being garbage makes me feel like I've done nothing but lose since this xpac came out. I have none of the good ones.

2. Dungeons were hard.
Dungeons have never been hard. Literally, never. This is a point I think is wrong. In classic, dungeons weren't all that hard, excluding the ones that used to be 10 man raids. If those count as dungeons, and they shouldn't, but if they did, they were a little bit of work. Not hard, though. A lot of people also reference how hard BC heroics were. I wonder if these people either A) sucked, or B) never got even recommended gear for actually doing the heroic. I remember, without having raided anything yet, literally pulling multiple groups of mobs with my brother's wife healing me and him just wrecking it all as we went. I don't understand why this always comes up. It wasn't just us that wrecked heroics before raiding. It was super common among players on all 3 servers I played on.

What's worse with this point is how people reference it, but honestly, dungeons now actually have options to make them hard. Never before have they had this. Challenge Mode dungeons kind of got there, but they weren't actually difficult. They just required you knew mechanics. At least now, knowing mechanics can still result in you getting killed.

3. Leveling was a part of the experience.
This is full on your opinion. Obviously, outdated content is going to have leveling made a easier and a little more pointless. The reason: To get you to current expansion content. However, you still choose to take the experience away. It isn't Blizzard's fault. My Wife just started playing a couple months ago. She just started BC content. Sure, she's level 101 having just finished all the Classic content, but she wanted to go from start to finish in order, and that's what she's going to do. She is enjoying the leveling experience so much, even though she's not really leveling from anything but dungeons. She enjoys this more than every other game she's ever played in her life (keep in mind she grew up as a gamer, even MMO gamer, just never WoW).

Now, you get to Legion content, the current expansion that's actually relevant to things for most players. Leveling is totally part of the experience, assuming you read anything at all while questing. Each zone has storylines and Blizzard did a dang good job at it. The scaling zones leaves it all relevant to your level, which is even nicer. When the NPC mentions some threat, they're relevant to your level. (On a different note, no, old expansions shouldn't be scaling up to our level. Maybe to max level of that specific expansion, but not above that).

4. Community was King
This depends on your server. I've been on Silvermoon primarily for most of my WoW days. We've always either A) Had an awesome community that couldn't complete content for the life of them, or B) Had a toxic community that was actually able to complete content for some reason. Don't know why it shifted back and forth. However, I never once would have said it was "king". It definitely used to be more active, but, and this is a HUGE but, I'm on a low population server now. Silvermoon has practically died off. When I play on the high population servers, the community feels the exact same as it's always been. Aside from guilds not quite being worth much, anyway.

5. Inconvenience leads to good memories.
This is still the case nowadays for most that I have seen in-game. People who hardcore raided say they miss when Illidan killed their group for hours, days, weeks on end without them killing him. It was inconvenient and sucked, but thinking back on it, they loved the memory. However, this was the exact same from Archimonde in WoD (very recent event here...) on Mythic. Guilds get tired, and hate it. One expansion later, they love thinking back on the bonding their group had in the constant attempts for it. This literally still happens today, the same as it did 10 years ago.

6. Game is a lobby to pug raids in.
Are you clearing Mythic ToS right now? Not very often do I see someone trying to pug the last boss. Maybe the first couple bosses, but the farther in, the less pug groups you see. Get your community together, form yourself a guild, and go in and try and take out the raid. Also, consider that I did nothing but pug until the beginning of WotLK and end of WotLK (Naxx and ICC I had a guild I was in for). My pug group cleared Ulduar 25 Hard Mode Yogg 3 days after the realm first. You know why? We were a bunch of pugs that stayed together in vent. Didn't need no guild. Game was a lobby all the way back in depending on how you played.

7. Boring stat increases on forgettable items.
Part of me doesn't even want to touch this one. This is literally how every single RPG works. What wrist item were you equipped with on March 17, 2008? Oh, you forgot? Some memorable item that must have been. People remember BiS, "ultimate" type items in RPGs, and that's it.

8. Facebook style treadmill game on the side
Yeah this crap is stupid. I'm okay with it when it's literally on the side. However, WoD had legendary questlines that involved it, this has one story lines that involve it. It's stupid. It should stay on the side with small benefits or it should get out. I know this is my opinion though and I can live with it because it's not terrible. Just annoying.

9. Dark Souls is hard
Learn to game FFS. Dark Souls gets the biggest rap on how hard it is. You want to know the people it's hard for? Impatient, unwilling to learn players. Hence why there are tons of people who complain about how this game used to be hard, but really it didn't. The game is so much harder now than it used to be. Just because you do LFR and not Mythic raiding, doesn't mean there's not this hard difficulty option. I do miss when there was only 1 difficulty, but that 1 difficult was never as hard as Mythic raiding has been. I mean, the top raiding guilds in the world say this time and time again, every single raid launch, but people refuse to listen to anyone. C'Thun is highly debatable, by the way. Nihilum killed him before the nerf because their whole raid was flasked, something that people didn't used to do. On top of it, the playerbase is 1/10 of the playerbase now. If there was 10x more people raiding back then, there would have been more kills without a nerf. However, that's not necessarily fair to reference C'Thun and his nerf because Mythic raids final boss gets nerfed all the time before getting killed. Don't know why people don't ever seem to take notice of that. *shrugs*

Final Point
Just because you're maybe losing interest in a game doesn't mean that Blizzard messed it up. Obviously all companies are going to dip their toes into waters that people don't like. When they do this, the company usually will pull back out. When people like it, though, the company jumps in. It's basically one of the primary rules to any company. I would have rather read a title on this thread called, "Why I don't like WoW" or something more opinion based. A title "What Ruined World of Warcraft" implies that WoW has, in fact, been ruined. It hasn't been ruined, though. You're stating an opinion of yours as a fact, which is how we get so much jacked up information in the world.

[Deleted]

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.

"Fresh and new" surely is by no means whatsoever better than "old, tired and repetitive". Naaaah.
Yeah....

[Hellrime]

Instead of flocking to vanilla servers, it'd be interesting to see more people who feel the game has lost its sense of challenge do more recent content on the live servers while giving up the kind of hand-holding crutch they decry and that wasn't there early on: DBM, WeakAuras, LFG/LFR, that kind of thing. Surely players as elite as they want us to know they are can rise to that kind of challenge, right?

(I'm not even being purely sarcastic here. There are guilds that impose level and ilevel caps and do previous expansions' raiding in a good approximation within the current game of how it was being at the level cap then. It would certainly be a lot tougher to do current content that way. But that's what challenges are for.)

Huge fallacy in your argument, if the content is only difficult while it is on the PTR without the help of the addons mentioned isn't that a problem? Vanilla, TBC, and WotLK all had raids that were still consistently difficult long after the PTR with all those addons. We have large groups of people sailing through Mythic content maybe a month after the release of a raid now.

[Deleted]

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.

Legion is as big of a failure as WoD was. Blizzard is just keeping it under wraps as tightly as possible so corporate shills are having an easier time making it look like WoW is still popular and thriving.

Money doesn't lie though, so either they make up for it with token money or Hearthstone and Overwatch are every bit as popular as they state.

[huth]

Huge fallacy in your argument, if the content is only difficult while it is on the PTR without the help of the addons mentioned isn't that a problem? Vanilla, TBC, and WotLK all had raids that were still consistently difficult long after the PTR with all those addons. We have large groups of people sailing through Mythic content maybe a month after the release of a raid now.

Vanilla had raids that could be cleared with only about half to three quarters of the group actually being active. Including Naxx. Autoshot /afk wasn't just an insult for hunters, it was how they actually played.

[Deleted]

For me, personally, i miss 2 big things.
1)The feeling of entering a raid knowing only a few selected ones had the pleasure of clearing said raids.
It gave me a lot of incentive to do them and a lot of immersion knowing it was a "rare place" to be in. There was some kinf of mysticism around raids in the old days.
Now that feeling is completely gone because of LFR.
2) I miss the times pre transmog where we actually started by feeling BAD about our character. And that's what's missing in WoW, "feeling BAD about your character". Feel the need to do current content. Feel the need to improve yourself, otherwise you would actually look like a clown.
And once you completed a tier set you would feel awesome and part of the "fashionable club".
That feeling was only temporary because once a new raid came out you would feel bad again creating a never ending cycle.
For me it was always a mini game to complete a "current tier set" plus the off pieces