The Problem with Pandas

[Krom2040]

Op would prefer the game was designed with himself in mind only. Questing is the entry point for every player in the game and he would prefer that it was hard enough to be challenge for him, it's too easy. Every aspect of this game has to be hard or it's shit. There is a ramping level of difficulty from questing all the way to heroic raiding (mythic) but apparently everyone has to be running all the time on heroic mode or the expansion is just crap as far as OP is concerned.

That and he hated MoP before he even experienced which means he was predetermined to find that he hated the majority of it.

It seems like you didn't bother reading a whole lot about I said. Granted, I wrote a lot, but you should be willing to digest it if you're going to be critical.

I said that Mists is artfully done and the monsters are varied enough.

I also said that the tuning is such that there is *no room* for challenge. You didn't bother to dispute this in any substantive way, but rather latched onto my claim that I didn't care for the theme of Mists (which is true but also not directly relevant).

WoW classic had monsters that took a long time to kill and did a lot of damage. It routinely had densely-packed areas with many patrols. It had elites that you had to watch out for and sometimes kill.

Now, ten years later, all of that is gone. You also have more escape abilities, and more damage buffs. You don't even need that stuff. The game is more convenient and the mechanics more sensible, which is why it *makes no sense* that the game has also, incidentally, been tuned to be easy. We *know* it's been tuned that way, because Timeless Isle has been tuned to be *hard*.

I'm not saying that leveling should be punishingly difficult; they don't have to bring back 1.0, which had plenty of faults. I'm not even saying it should take a long time. I just think that while I'm doing it, I should be mildly aware that I'm playing a video game. They made it so consistently easy that leveling feels like *more* of a chore than if it had real, traditional video game challenge to it.

Let me put it to you like this: I'm not a huge Tetris fan, but I can play it for awhile and be entertained because it tests me a little bit. If you changed each block into a square, and then tried to entertain me with some animations on each square, then I would not be pleased and would quit very quickly.

Games must be games, not rides. They don't have to be *really hard*, but they must be reasonably capable of allowing the player to deal with failure.

In WoW at this moment, there's no room for any challenge in leveling and that's totally by design. They know how to do challenging.

[Otimus]

The problem with WoW is that nothing of any consequence is challenging in the least except the top ends. Like, everything is SUPER easy until it isn't. There isn't an in between. It's basically two different games made for two different groups, sort of, and it's kind of annoying. On top of that, too, anything fun for smaller groups basically is massively unrewarding, to boot so the special lil' raiders won't feel they have to do it, gotta coddle them good! Depending on what one socially wants to do, you can easily find yourself stuck in a spot with zero advancement, and it's been that way forever, for the most part, and it kind of really sucks, but I don't know what much can be done about it from a gameplay point of view. (Personally, though, I think every sort of playstyle should be rewarded equally, but that'll never, ever happen, because raiders just -have- to be coddled.)

[Krom2040]

It would be nice if there were an option of more difficult leveling that offered some reward (faster, more gold, something). If you just want more difficult leveling with no reward, take off most of your gear.

That's an interesting idea.

I think to some extent the original idea may have been that people would do dungeons if they wanted a challenge. They used to be pretty hard and success was not a given.

But in any case, I do think the framework is there for a difficult game if they just tweaked the numbers, so maybe if they had a mode where you took double damage and did half damage in exchange for double the exp, people would be interested.

[Enosh]

WoW classic had monsters that took a long time to kill and did a lot of damage. It routinely had densely-packed areas with many patrols. It had elites that you had to watch out for and sometimes kill.

so what's hard about this?
did vanilla mobs have many interruptible attacks?
did they have more telegraphs that promoted skillfull dodging of abilities like wildstar?

fuck no, you hit it and it hit you back until one died
but because it did more damage, you had less ways to avoid it and it took longer to kill you lost more hp, thus you had to eat every two or three pulls

hitting a mob until it dies isn't harder than hitting a mob until it dies just because you have to eat every three mobs, it's just more fucking tedious

[DeadmanWalking]

It seems like you didn't bother reading a whole lot about I said. Granted, I wrote a lot, but you should be willing to digest it if you're going to be critical.

I said that Mists is artfully done and the monsters are varied enough.

I also said that the tuning is such that there is *no room* for challenge. You didn't bother to dispute this in any substantive way, but rather latched onto my claim that I didn't care for the theme of Mists (which is true but also not directly relevant).

WoW classic had monsters that took a long time to kill and did a lot of damage. It routinely had densely-packed areas with many patrols. It had elites that you had to watch out for and sometimes kill.

Now, ten years later, all of that is gone. You also have more escape abilities, and more damage buffs. You don't even need that stuff. The game is more convenient and the mechanics more sensible, which is why it *makes no sense* that the game has also, incidentally, been tuned to be easy. We *know* it's been tuned that way, because Timeless Isle has been tuned to be *hard*.

I'm not saying that leveling should be punishingly difficult; they don't have to bring back 1.0, which had plenty of faults. I'm not even saying it should take a long time. I just think that while I'm doing it, I should be mildly aware that I'm playing a video game. They made it so consistently easy that leveling feels like *more* of a chore than if it had real, traditional video game challenge to it.

Let me put it to you like this: I'm not a huge Tetris fan, but I can play it for awhile and be entertained because it tests me a little bit. If you changed each block into a square, and then tried to entertain me with some animations on each square, then I would not be pleased and would quit very quickly.

Games must be games, not rides. They don't have to be *really hard*, but they must be reasonably capable of allowing the player to deal with failure.

In WoW at this moment, there's no room for any challenge in leveling and that's totally by design. They know how to do challenging.

Obviously if I don't take every word you spew as the word of God almighty then I didn't really read what you said. Obviously it's not because I disagree with your opinion then it's because I lack reading comprehension. Let's not pretend that if someone disagrees with you it's because they are stupid and incapable of reading and your word is mana from heaven.

This isn't 10 years ago. I'm sorry but MMO's have learned many lessons over time to improve the experience of everyone. 10 years ago I was in FFXI spending 3 hours in a random group of 5 people killing 1 mob at a time just to level one level. Questing didn't exist to level. It's not something I would say is an improvement on todays version. If I wanted that experience the game still exists and I could go do it right now but it was only good in that a better alternative did not exist. In comparison it was a shitty system with no real endgame. If you want your experience from 10 years ago then FFXI and everquest are still out there, go get it.

Things change and things get better. There is no way I want to spend 6 months leveling by killing scorpions one at a time. They had more health and damage, whoop de doo, that isn't challenge. Getting 10-20 people organized to deal with varying mechanics is challenge, getting a dungeon done in pre-set gear in a time limit is challenge. Defeating real players in a battlefield is challenge, not fighting a programed skin of a scorpion on rails. Did you have to double tap dodge acid squirts? Did you have to stun the creature at the right time or die? No, you just had to do enough damage to kill it before it killed you.

My opinion stands, you came in looking for shit and so you stepped in it and then expect everyone to think you are the ultimate say in this expansions value as you point at the shit on your shoe and complain. You didn't have an open mind, you are the kind of person who makes decisions about how something is going to suck before you experience it and for that reason alone your opinion has very little wieght. I don't put any stock in reviews of anything from someone who says, "I expected this to suck before I experienced it and I was right."

Sorry but the questing experience is there to introduce you to the expansion, not to challenge you. Even Vanilla wasn't a challenge, it was just a long irratating grind of killing 1 mob at a time over a long period of time. The only difference between it and FFXI was that in FFXI you had to have a party of 5 and that was the difficulty. I don't care what you do in wow if it requires only one player there is no difficulty that you can reach because not all classes are equal and all you have to do is figure out the 1-3 best attack combos and you will blow through it.

What you remember about wows difficulty is all nostalgia. It wasn't hard in vanilla just unnecessarily grindy. Ask any modern gamer what they think about 'grind'. Lol!

[grexly75]

Telling people to take their gear off to make the game harder is like telling people to use ground mounts instead of flying mounts if they like it so much, they won't opt to do it unless they are forced to do so while claiming that the ease of the feature is ruining the game.

Funnily enough I was going to suggest that the OP do exactly just that to take there gear off of have say level 40 gear in a level 80 or 90 zone.. There was supposedly the Iron Man Challenge where folks would level a toon to max level without dying once..

OT I didn't read the OP as just saw a wall of text, if it was short sharp and too the point then yeah would have but not when it goes on and on..

[DeadmanWalking]

I'll also note that you leveled at a time when they lowered the exp requirement of MoP by 33% and you only had to level 5 levels, unlike in Vanilla when you had over 12X's the amount of leveling to do.

[grexly75]

Obviously if I don't take every word you spew as the word of God almighty then I didn't really read what you said. Obviously it's not because I disagree with your opinion then it's because I lack reading comprehension. Let's not pretend that if someone disagrees with you it's because they are stupid and incapable of reading and your word is mana from heaven.

This isn't 10 years ago. I'm sorry but MMO's have learned many lessons over time to improve the experience of everyone. 10 years ago I was in FFXI spending 3 hours in a random group of 5 people killing 1 mob at a time just to level one level. Questing didn't exist to level. It's not something I would say is an improvement on todays version. If I wanted that experience the game still exists and I could go do it right now but it was only good in that a better alternative did not exist. In comparison it was a shitty system with no real endgame. If you want your experience from 10 years ago then FFXI and everquest are still out there, go get it.

Things change and things get better. There is no way I want to spend 6 months leveling by killing scorpions one at a time. They had more health and damage, whoop de doo, that isn't challenge. Getting 10-20 people organized to deal with varying mechanics is challenge, getting a dungeon done in pre-set gear in a time limit is challenge. Defeating real players in a battlefield is challenge, not fighting a programed skin of a scorpion on rails. Did you have to double tap dodge acid squirts? Did you have to stun the creature at the right time or die? No, you just had to do enough damage to kill it before it killed you.

My opinion stands, you came in looking for shit and so you stepped in it and then expect everyone to think you are the ultimate say in this expansions value as you point at the shit on your shoe and complain. You didn't have an open mind, you are the kind of person who makes decisions about how something is going to suck before you experience it and for that reason alone your opinion has very little wieght. I don't put any stock in reviews of anything from someone who says, "I expected this to suck before I experienced it and I was right."

Sorry but the questing experience is there to introduce you to the expansion, not to challenge you. Even Vanilla wasn't a challenge, it was just a long irratating grind of killing 1 mob at a time over a long period of time. The only difference between it and FFXI was that in FFXI you had to have a party of 5 and that was the difficulty. I don't care what you do in wow if it requires only one player there is no difficulty that you can reach because not all classes are equal and all you have to do is figure out the 1-3 best attack combos and you will blow through it.

What you remember about wows difficulty is all nostalgia. It wasn't hard in vanilla just unnecessarily grindy. Ask any modern gamer what they think about 'grind'. Lol!

I totally agree when I first came to this game 6 months or so before the release of TBC my mage was only level 56 the grind back then was very long and laborious..

- - - Updated - - -

I'll also note that you leveled at a time when they lowered the exp requirement of MoP by 33% and you only had to level 5 levels, unlike in Vanilla when you had over 12X's the amount of leveling to do.

Yeah only doing 5 levels in Cata and MoP was a walk in the park compared to going from 1 to 60 during vanilla, back then leveling seemed to take forever.. Did a lot of hopping between Eastern Kingdoms and Kalimdor.. lol

[Deleted]

You need to play a single player game

[Tyrgannus]

Have you tried some of the solo content like Brawlgar, Proving Grounds, or even soloing old raids? You say you don't like the coordination in raiding but there are ways to challenge yourself in solo play

[Krom2040]

so what's hard about this?
did vanilla mobs have many interruptible attacks?
did they have more telegraphs that promoted skillfull dodging of abilities like wildstar?

fuck no, you hit it and it hit you back until one died
but because it did more damage, you had less ways to avoid it and it took longer to kill you lost more hp, thus you had to eat every two or three pulls

hitting a mob until it dies isn't harder than hitting a mob until it dies just because you have to eat every three mobs, it's just more fucking tedious

Thats a good question, and I may have used a lot of words without explaining myself very well.

Having monsters with *enough* hit points gives you, as a hypothetical game designer, room to inject challenges. WoW classic had lots of moments where it was just you as the player running up to a single monster at a time and whacking at it for a *long* time until it was dead. That wasn't very fun.

But it also had areas where you had to be on the lookout for patrols, because pulling too many mobs put you in a bind. If you didn't pull carefully, same thing. Or if you let a guy run away and pull his friends in. Or you at least had time to pay a price if you were too slow to interrupt a heal or a big spell.

When the entire game amounts to burning dudes down in 3-5 seconds, there's no space to do anything interesting at all really. This is really just common sense and I don't even feel like I shills need to elaborate much further.

That said, I think the difficulty was too high in Classic and probably just about right through most of TBC. They struck a good balance of a fast pace and challenge. That's what lacking right now is balance.

Except in timeless isle, which is pretty good if you're a fresh 90.

And again, some of you guys are mentally confusing a few issues here. It doesn't have to be *slow*. As far as I'm concerned the leveling can take just as long as it does now... if you're playing well. Of course I think there should be a penalty for playing poorly. But in general, the time it takes to kill a mob is totally unrelated to overall leveling time, you can obviously just increase the exp gained from each kill to balance it out. But right now I think the average player spends way more time just running between mobs than they do fighting anything, and that's goofy.

They're welcome to up the damage output of monsters, but if they upped it so much that you could kill things in 5 seconds and *still* be challenged by incoming damage, then monsters would be nuking people left and right. That's not great either. MMO's by nature generally have to be more tactical than twitch to be manageable.

I get the impression that because I sometimes try to make multiple points in a single post, it makes it very easy for people to just home in on one thing they disagree with and consider it in complete isolation to everything else. So that's my fault I guess.

[Jewsco]

Yet another in the long line if bashing MoP with no real facts behind it just suck because I said so.
I wonder why leveling 5 whole levels seems easier than going from 1 to 60?
Adding FarmVille sucks too, but I didn't try it out though and the ample opportunities one could make money on it for about ten minutes of work a day.

Also, elites and group up quests are gone from two expansions ago.
I wonder why that is maybe because not many people there any more and why would the game block some ones leveling with elites with out having help easily out there like when it was new.

Did you try the elites that are in every zone as you leveled in pandaria?
I doubt you could easily defeat them. Specially any of neutral pandarian ones that either did big frontal cones or massive healing that one had to interrupt or get out of.
How about the ones on thunder island? Or the timeless island?
Bet again you didn't.

Wow since the end if vanilla has been about the end game product.
Leveling is a means to an end.
This expansion had raiding, pvping, challenge mode dungeons(bet didn't try that), brawlers guild(again did you try that ?)
And then brought back world bosses like the sha of fear and such did you try them?
We had to group up to kill them at first. Wipes happened often.

Heck the big Dino on Dino island was a pain to kill at first do you even know of Dino island?
Bet not. My first kill was due to the fact we had 3 groups of 40 men and we caused it to lag out nullifying it monsterous aoe damage that thing put out.

You missed the whole expansion the come back at very end and wonder why it was easy to level.
You missed it and that was your choice quit belly aching now.

[grexly75]

If you want to make leveling challenging you can by either pulling more mobs than you normally would and see if you can survive..

Go from 1 to max level without dying once, there are ways of making leveling challenging and shows your ingenuity rather than relying on someone else to script it in..

In the end the devs can only do so much, I would think that they are in some ways relying on the player to work out their own ways of challenging themselves.. Because really in the end you get more sense of achievement when you can make the challenge yourself..

[Krom2040]

Have you tried some of the solo content like Brawlgar, Proving Grounds, or even soloing old raids? You say you don't like the coordination in raiding but there are ways to challenge yourself in solo play

I really like the idea of proving grounds and I think the challenge modes are brilliant. I also generally like heroics (which they're bringing back, to their credit). Both of these, though, lack any real reward for your investment, so they're kind of just optional things.

Optional challenging content is good. All of these are way more challenging than world content has any right to be. But that said, I think it's still important that the outdoor content is challenging enough to provide it with some meaningful texture. Some parts of it should be hard, and should stand out as tricky areas that maybe you would benefit from grouping up to complete. Again, examples would be the troll quests in the Hinterlands or STV, or for that matter the pirate quests in STV. You could definitely solo this stuff, but you had to be careful. Or you could group up.

I've had good times just grouping up with random folks to quest faster. Right now that's really just imposing a mathematical impediment on yourself.

[Maniac2]

You need to play a single player game

But I do- WoW is the best single player game I ever played

[LilSaihah]

I don't think this is the problem with pandas. I think it's a problem with pandas.

The general ease of the game is a problem. The levels are supposed to be a meaningful place where you acclimate to new spells and abilities; however, you don't actually learn how many of these abilities work in practice until you get to the endgame. The game wouldn't be significantly harder to learn if it had 20 levels. It's more or less just drudgery before you can get to the content you actually want to do at the endgame. It's really hard to get engaged in the game when it's so easy.

There are other problems with the game like narrative design, the narrative itself and the incredibly restrictive character building systems (both in terms of character creation and character advancement).