Why was World of Warcraft dumbed down that much?

[uopayroll]

You make it sound like there is no such thing as a WoW fansite/spoiler site (much like the one you are posting this on) that gives away where the bosses are, that has forums to tell you when and how to use a skill, to choose which talents you should take, to tell you how a boss should be done before even encountering it and not having to learn via multiple wipes. You say it makes no sense to automatically know a skill, but accepted that you had to go see a trainer to swing a sword faster/harder?

WoW has been streamlined and made more efficient, not dumbed down...if anything it was smartenned up, because a lot of things that used to be...were pretty dumb.

[Deleted]

Challenge? Excitement? It used to be to understand how to best gear/enchant your class, you literally either had to make a spreadsheet to calculate stat balances, or study someone else's spreadsheets. Talents were mindless and had no real choice - you either followed the optimal selections as seen on some website, or you were doing it wrong. Raids were rather binary as well - someone misstepping, or missing an interrupt, or just plain lagging at the wrong moment, meant a wipe without question. That is, if you were lucky enough to get all 40 members of your raiding group together - "raid night" was about 25% actual raiding and 75% waiting for everyone to log in and get to the raid instance; ditto for dungeons - dungeon runs consisted of spamming trade-chat for hours for maybe a half-hour of actual content.

Just because it was grindy and tedious and time-consuming and mind-numbingly complicated, doesn't mean it was better.

Being a simple-fest doesn't make it good either.


But I guess you people have low standards to begin with.

[SodiumChloride]

Challenge? Excitement? It used to be to understand how to best gear/enchant your class, you literally either had to make a spreadsheet to calculate stat balances, or study someone else's spreadsheets.

Actually you still do. Hence the existence of Simcraft.

Also god help you if you tried to reforge without Ask Mr Robot or Reforgelite. You will literally lose your mind - or at least develop a headache.

[Ragedaug]

If you think about how players looked these fact up in guides and addons, the answer would obviously be "yes". Playeres aren't "leet" for knowing to type "wow warrior rotation" into Google.

+1 - This part made my chuckle, I have been saying this for some time. The idea that that only the hardcore / elite players knew what google is, is baffling. All WoW has done is incorporate information that has already been publicly available via 3rd party websites and incorporated some into the game.

If we want to blame anyone for dumbing down the game, I'm afraid we have to look in the mirror.

We are the ones who visited Thottbot, Allakhazam, Wowhead, Tankspot, Icy-Veins, Mapwow, Zeherah's FemaleDwarf, Elitist Jerks, etc. We are the ones who downloaded Deadly Boss Mods, Questhelper, and Rawr, etc.

We go into a boss fight already having memorized the answer key, while still bringing the answer sheet, AND having someone shout the answers to us as the questions are asked, then sit back and complain the "test was too easy"??

[Kalcheus]

We go into a boss fight already having memorized the answer key, while still bringing the answer sheet, AND having someone shout the answers to us as the questions are asked, then sit back and complain the "test was too easy"??

If I had room in my sig, I'd totally add this. Well done.

[Pull My Finger]

cuz casuals cry like little babies if they dont get what they want

sorry but it is, any aspect of the game is so retard friendly atm

You sound like a very knowledgeable fellow and obviously bring very convincing arguments and observations to the table.

[Deleted]

Speaking from personal experience, I started playing the game when I was 10, I'm now 17, looking back at OPs points on how it's been dumbed down I agree and disagree with certain points, especially when you say it's designed for kids etc.

The class trainer, I do agree, I miss getting to a level and getting excited to buy a new move and dropping everything to go and get it, now it is pretty much level up and noticing a new icon in your actionbar. On the plusside there's no money sink or travelling long distances, on the downside class trainers are practically just filler mobs for towns and cities

As for the mobs I haven't played long enough in MoP to comment, though I've been oneshotting most things with my rogue, so yes they seem quite underpowered.

Spell tooltips, I must admit I haven't seen anything saying where to use the spell and how? My first proper character was a rogue and my character now is a rogue and the tooltips look exactly the same, bar a few adjustments over the years from patches. Maybe backstab says "must be behind the target" but I was smart enough to figure that out.

Talent trees, I completely agree, it's nothing exciting and offers a bare minimum way to seperate characters. Talents were much better when there were hundreds of paths to take and you had to think carefully about where each valuable point went and whether it would benefit you in PvP, PvE or just make life easier by hindering the hinderances of your class.

Dungeons, I feel low level dungeons (only ones I've done in MOP so far are WC and SFK) are dumbed down to much, and offer no challenge, but I do like the dungeon maps, nothing was more frustrating than spending half an hour wandering around Wailing Caverns while the tank had to fly to org to ask in /2 if anyone knew where the remaining bosses were, or leaving a dungeon and realising your group skipped a few bosses.

[SodiumChloride]

cuz casuals cry like little babies if they dont get what they want



sorry but it is, any aspect of the game is so retard friendly atm

LOL. Ironic, if not (unintentionally) hypocritical, as causals rarely ever "cry" - they just quit - and it's the hardcore who whine endlessly on forums.

[Lomppa]

Oh the irony how blizzard is this big capitalistic beast, but ingame they want it to be on the other side of the scale, its almost communism ingame.
But they gotta make ends meet, so sure they gotta make the majority happy.

[Deleted]

This: https://twitter.com/akamikeb/status/346418880312397825

[Nemesiz]

"Talents were much better when there were hundreds of paths to take" - How many useless talents did you actually pick back in the day? =D

I myself play a hunter and have done so since around end Vanill. It has almost always been an easy task to pick the correct options, also known as cookie cutter builds. I only remember Resourcefullness as being a bit iffy.

Tbh the way talents are now, you have to give it a second thought more often, same with glyphs imho.

[Deleted]

Nice "I hate lfr they dont deserve saem epixs" Cant we all just get along?
Im a good player and im neither a douche nor elitist, still i do lfr? Weird? I know!

[Ciddy]

Vanilla - C'Thun and classic Naxx.
TBC - pre-nerf Hyjal/BT/Sunwell. Hell, a lot of average guilds hadn't downed Kael'thas/Vashj before those got nerfed.
Wrath - Sarth 3D (before outgearing it, was doable but still challenging for most), Yogg+0, heroic 25M Lich King with buffs disabled.
Cata - Heroic Madness of Deathwing without the nerfs, heroic Ragnaros, Sinestra (before outgearing it).
MoP - Heroic full clear of ToT (and heroic full clears of the other raids while they were still current content).

Likely plenty of others that I'm forgetting. Every expansion has had some form of challenging content for the "hardcore" players to do. There is also really high-end PvP if that's your thing. If you're not into dragon slaying, go get an arena/RBG team to the highest rating possible.

How many of the players who have been spouting "The game is too easy now! The peasant casuals should worship the ground I walk on!" during every single expansion (and yes, that has been going on since and happened in Vanilla too) have actually done all of the above and didn't consider it challenging at all? Just curious. The difference now is the fact that players like me who can't do all of the above (for whatever reason) have other options for stuff to do now. For some reason, this is a problem.

[Gsara]

+1 -
We go into a boss fight already having memorized the answer key, while still bringing the answer sheet, AND having someone shout the answers to us as the questions are asked, then sit back and complain the "test was too easy"??

The best part of all this is that the majority of players still fail horribly even with all the information handed to them. All you have to do is look at how many people make posts or comments about how hard normals are in ToT.
I always find it comical when people like the OP make these threads just complaining how dumbed down wow is today. WoW was never in anyway hard at all except getting the required amount of people in a raid or bg that weren't all mouth breathing idiots. Sure there is challenging heroic bosses but overall the game was never hard or really a grind.

[Teebone]

Anyone complaining wow is too easy should try raiding without any mods at all. Seriously, try it.

[Mteq]

easy to learn, difficult to master. Heroic raiding is not easy, neither is top end PvP.

the whole reason this game still excists is because of blizzards philisophy.

just an FYI, but this game wouldnt exist in its current form (if at all) if it were just 250k heroic elitist raiders that played.

[Deleted]

"Talents were much better when there were hundreds of paths to take" - How many useless talents did you actually pick back in the day? =D

I myself play a hunter and have done so since around end Vanill. It has almost always been an easy task to pick the correct options, also known as cookie cutter builds. I only remember Resourcefullness as being a bit iffy.

Tbh the way talents are now, you have to give it a second thought more often, same with glyphs imho.

Quite often actually! As I was only 9/10 years old I thought my best plan of action would be to spec into all trees so I was balanced out and a master of everything, little did I know you wouldn't get enough points to become a jack of all trades. And I rarely made it past level 20 (I considered this an achievement) so I often found myself like 5/1/3

[skrump]

Walk outside and start a random conversation with someone you don't know, at least one of you will walk away thinking the other is an idiot and you would probably both be right to some extent.

The world is full of Lazy self entitled morons and it is in the best interest of any business to cater to the majority.

Perfect example being the Iphone/ipad, It's essentially a half assed portable toy computer made for mouth breathing retards who couldn't figure out how to set the time on a old VCR yet it cost twice as much as a laptop that is capable of doing 10x more.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

More open and less time investment required to be at "endgame" = opens up the game to casuals*, there's way more casuals than hardcore players = more money for Blizzard (Activision)

*Casual means people who play less, can be insanely good and still casual. Casual is not = noob.


That's pretty much why LFR, LFG, weekly caps and such has been introduced to the game.
Blizzard has repeatedly said that they've always lost and gained players at the same rate (was more players coming to the game than left before) but now there's not as many people coming to the game as people leaving and that's why the game is bleeding total numbers. The very hardcore and dedicated players who's been around for half a decade should be heard and to some extent we are, still though we see a lot of moves towards bringing in casual players which I'm fine with but there's not a lot for the people that play 20-40hrs a week to do which in the end is going (imo) to be the end of this game. Wow is simply to immersive to make casual players stay and the more blizzard try to cater to them the more they abandon their loyal subscribers.

[Ciddy]

Quite often actually! As I was only 9/10 years old I thought my best plan of action would be to spec into all trees so I was balanced out and a master of everything, little did I know you wouldn't get enough points to become a jack of all trades. And I rarely made it past level 20 (I considered this an achievement) so I often found myself like 5/1/3

I did that same thing in Vanilla on my first character. By the time I hit 60 on my warrior, I had a crazy-ass hybrid spec that was about 1/3 or less of the way down each tree but didn't have any of the top tier abilities, and I didn't bother fixing it for a long time. That was back before the armory existed, and you couldn't inspect people's talents either, so I got away with it for a while before one of my guildies (who was less noob than I was) figured it out and schooled me.

I was....uh....a little older than 9/10 in vanilla though. :|