Blizzard should swallow their pride to save WoW

[Conscious]

Broken classic ain't coming back.
Sadly people who can't seem to move on keep coming to the forums to cry about it.

The current model sure as hell won't be either.

[Icecreamcake]

OP the things you have suggest only make the time more time consuming and meaning less. Why would you want people to travel further just to get their bodys and take longer to get to dungeons? I believe those additions are fantastic as they saved a lot of the down time in WoW. Remember when you had to wait 20 minutes for the group to show up at the entrance of an instance? Who wants to do that again? Yes they have implemented things in the game now to make it easier and faster to the actual action and they are different from what they used to be, but it doesn't mean we should revert back to the old ways simply for nostalgic reasons. That's like saying we should go back to riding horses and ditch our cars because they're more harmful to the environment and is causing global warming. There's simply no going back and frankly WoW is too old of a game to hold the attention as it used to, what goes up must come down.

[Deleted]

If swallowing their pride means firing Ghostcrawler, then yes because he's one arrogant bastard living in his own bubble.

[Conscious]

If swallowing their pride means firing Ghostcrawler, then yes because he's one arrogant bastard living in his own bubble.

Not going to comment on his attitude, let's just say I don't think too highly of him either.

But, that said the development team needs an overhaul just as badly, if not more, than the actual game itself.

[eillas]

All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.
Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth
Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages
Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly
Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads
Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).
Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FopyRHHlt3M

Now for my serious reply.

They are never going to remove flying mounts especially when they crafted certain areas to need flying mount.

Dungeons you mean 1-89 thats where we learn out class for raiding

Man thats what we have raids and challenge modes for. no one wants to do 2 hours of BRD

Phasing helps with story

you sound like someone who like ganking much lower lvl players and are upset you dont get to camp a lvl 10 as a lvl 90

[Volpit]

couldn't agree with the OP more.

Current wow is trash. I love vanilla and thats why I discovered a sweet private server and have been having the time of my life on a 1x exp blizzlike server.

I forgot how fun the game used to be.

Takes days to lvl and it's fun I play maybe 1 or 2 hours a day do a few quests then log off. It's a lot of fun.

OP is dead on current wow has nothing to offer and isn't even remotely fun.

Of course all of this is my opinion.

[Saffa]

OP, have the Asian players agreed to/want these things as it is there the subscriptions have been lost, not the EU or US servers.

[eillas]

also, this reminds me of SW:TOR. Bioware was like no LFG for our game, like the community wants. Community agreed. one to two months later. Community: OMG we made a horrible mistake. give us lfg give us lfg.

[Notos]

couldn't agree with the OP more.

Current wow is trash. I love vanilla and thats why I discovered a sweet private server and have been having the time of my life on a 1x exp blizzlike server.

I forgot how fun the game used to be.

Takes days to lvl and it's fun I play maybe 1 or 2 hours a day do a few quests then log off. It's a lot of fun.

OP is dead on current wow has nothing to offer and isn't even remotely fun.

Of course all of this is my opinion.

I'm curious as to what you found so fascinating that keeps you playing. I have rolled on private servers in the past (1.12, 2.4), and once the initial nostalgia wears off I get bored and go back to live. It just reminded me how far the game has come from the god-awful, gouge-my-eyes-out experience of leveling a prot warrior in vanilla.

[Ielenia]

One word can easily sum up what is wrong with WOW and that word is "IMMERSION"

Actually... I feel the same immersion into the game right now as when I started playing back in early BC.

Remove the following things:

All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.
Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth
Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages
Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly
Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads
Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).
Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.

1) I'm impartial to that one;
2) No;
3) No;
4) No. Blizzard did that with early Cataclysm and it was a shit-fest of complaints. I, myself, loved the greater difficulty;
5) I kinda agree with the 1~2 flight points per zone;
6) I'm impartial to that one. Don't really care about PvP as long as it doesn't affect PvE;
7) And I'm going with 'No' for this one, as well. I like having the world around me change as I progress with the quests. Helps immersion;

Add the following things

All future expansions should take place in Azeroth, do not add any more zones, just develop the story on Azeroth so it thrives once again.

Only in Azeroth, and no new zones? That would get boring VERY FAST. What's next? No new evil beings to fight? Use only what it is in the game already? Nothing new, no new lore, nothing?

Conclusion

Ofc none of this will happen as the tears that would be shed could possibly flood the world and wipe us all out. The new breed of player has no balls, has no ability to shake him/herself down after being ganked and certainly has no patience to ride from A to B. Can you imagine the wow players of today trying to survive in Vanilla, they would have a heart attack at how hardcore it used to be. No I am afraid MMO's now are so easy, so spoon fed that the players today simply could not cope with old wow.

From a business point of view Blizzard are currently their own worst enemy, they are killing the game by making it so easy and forgiving. If they opened a BC server millions would return, but this would be an admission of doing it wrong and the PR department won't allow that

Yeah... insult the players. That's a great way to make your argument look better. NOT! There is a difference between one gank happening randomly in the world, and corpse-camping on Stranglethorn vale, so much so that it makes it impossible to play (remember that from the 'good old days' of vanilla?) And traveling from 'point A to B'? Oh yes.. I remember, back in Goldshire I'd get a quest that would take me to the border of Loch Modan with Wetlands. Oh, so fun times, pressing auto-run and staying a looong time doing nothing but steering my character... sometimes attacking an aggressive mob that wandered too close to my character... yeah, right.

Blizzard is doing what it needs to do: make their game more accessible. Why? Because the game would be dead, buried and rotten six feet under the ground by today if it was still 'like Vanilla'. The game evolved. It's more accessible, it has content for every kind of player, and the world is bigger than ever before! Now, if the game evolved in a direction YOU don't like, all I can say to you is: "Cancel your sub, go make something productive with your life, and get rid of those rose-tinted glasses."

[Duronos]

Although I agree with the OP's analyses. I do not agree with the solution.

All the things you've listed are things they should never have implemented to begin with. You can't fix convenience in an online game.

Adding convenience to an online game is like doing drugs. It feels good for a while, but in the longterm you're going to be stuck with it and only see how badly it ruined everything.

If only I had enough signature space for this quote...

EDIT: To add on, I was a casual pretty much through Vanilla and some of BC. I was never bored of the game then and it was much harder, all it meant was I had something to improve on each time I logged in instead of farming raids like hardcore players did. See that's the problem, hardcore raiders like farming, they like being competitive. Some people aren't competitive when it comes to MMO, they just want to take their time or they don't have as much time as the former.

If people understood that then they... Why even bother, I can't even stand the game anymore as it is...

[KeirAdish]

If only I had enough signature space for this quote...

EDIT: To add on, I was a casual pretty much through Vanilla and some of BC. I was never bored of the game then and it was much harder, all it meant was I had something to improve on each time I logged in instead of farming raids like hardcore players did. See that's the problem, hardcore raiders like farming, they like being competitive. Some people aren't competitive when it comes to MMO, they just want to take their time or they don't have as much time as the former.

If people understood that then they... Why even bother, I can't even stand the game anymore as it is...

I have to ask though...

How is it improving yourself to have to sit in trade chat and find a group then walk to the instance...
Wouldn't it be more improving yourself to que up and get 2 maybe 3 dungeons done in the same amount of time...

[Mawnix]

It's so funny.

Because sub numbers are down, and no one sees the real reason they're down, nor will accept it because every single person is convinced their opinion on the matter is right, everyone finds a need to post a thread about how to fix it.

It's a problem that can't be fixed.

It's also a problem Blizzard didn't even cause.

The sooner we accept this, the sooner the community will settle down and open its eyes.

[Meintastic]

as someone who has played since beta, only giving up recently as I got bored of it(probably will be back to fight Garrosh), I got to say that doing any of the things OP listed would be terrible.

Its like playing Xenoblade Chronicles and forcing everyone to run everywhere without the option of teleporting back to a guide stone. The world is just too big. LFD is probably one of the better features they came out with, and I for one enjoy LFR as I don't have to schedule an entire night around raiding, scheduling my bathroom breaks, when I can eat, yada yada.

is lfr done properly? probably not. But its a step in the right direction

[Thage]

All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.

Because things were so awesome when half your party would be too lazy to ride there, forcing two of you to ride out and play Meeting Stone Bitch.

Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth

I'm sure Blizzard will be right on a change that wastes countless man-hours and resources spent on the bulk of Cataclysm's release content.

Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages

In return, make it a bannable offense to keep quest hubs depopulated for more than a half hour on non-PvP servers.

Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly

They tried this in Cataclysm. It backfired spectacularly.

Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads

I'm sorry, how is this any different from Vanilla? I didn't ride halfway across the continent, I took a flight path close to the raid I was headed to and alt-tabbed to hang out on AIM and listen to music, or fired up the N64 and played Ocarina of Time 'til I landed.

Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).

Missing the point of the queue-anywhere change: to let people do things other than camp out around the battlemaster.

Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.

Removing phasing would damage immersion even more, because the world becomes static and unchanging despite your supposed heroics. There's a reason Outland is currently the redheaded stepchild of questing among many players and even Blizzard.

[Sageofthe10paths]

I disagree with the OP, on all fronts. If we did any of these things it would make the game worse and lose more subs. Mmo's evolve over time and this is a ten year old game, and a huge success story. It doesn't need fixing so much as its just dwindling down so a low solid number. By low number I mean 8 million, hell Age of Wushu has 20 million subs and that game is bullshit.

[Duronos]

I have to ask though...

How is it improving yourself to have to sit in trade chat and find a group then walk to the instance...
Wouldn't it be more improving yourself to que up and get 2 maybe 3 dungeons done in the same amount of time...

Some people like me sometimes just wanted to chill out and just talk to others on our servers. Sense of community if you think about it, I still remember many names from Vanilla and BC.

[Mormolyce]

As a few of you will know who have seen my recent WOW videos I have returned after a 3 year break to see what has gone wrong with the game I played 6 times a week for 6 years of my life.

One word can easily sum up what is wrong with WOW and that word is "IMMERSION"

Let me stop you right there.

Immersion is gone because the game is 9 years old and you know it inside and out now. No more running around looking at the world in wonder, not knowing what to do next, because it isn't new anymore.

Blizzard can't magically make a 9 year old game new again. How many games can you honestly say you've played month after month for 9 years and they haven't lost the shine?

[Thage]

How many games can you honestly say you've played month after month for 9 years and they haven't lost the shine?

Aside from burnout in BC and Cataclysm, WoW. Other than that, Megaman Legends 1 and 2, most of my SNES titles, Radiata Stories (not quite 9 years old but rapidly approaching the due date), Suikoden 1-3... there's a good chunk of 'em, but not many of them are MMOs. Come to think of it, only one of them is.

[Duronos]

Let me stop you right there.

Immersion is gone because the game is 9 years old and you know it inside and out now. No more running around looking at the world in wonder, not knowing what to do next, because it isn't new anymore.

Blizzard can't magically make a 9 year old game new again. How many games can you honestly say you've played month after month for 9 years and they haven't lost the shine?

Honestly, there's no immersion because all you do is get teleported. LFR and LFG killed a lot of socialization. An MMO being old doesn't kill any community, it's what is implemented in the MMO that does.

---------- Post added 2013-05-10 at 01:09 AM ----------

Aside from burnout in BC and Cataclysm, WoW. Other than that, Megaman Legends 1 and 2, most of my SNES titles, Radiata Stories (not quite 9 years old but rapidly approaching the due date), Suikoden 1-3... there's a good chunk of 'em, but not many of them are MMOs. Come to think of it, only one of them is.

Super Mario World too... Could play that game all day.