So, what didn't work this expansion?

[HeedmySpeed]

It wasn't to harsh for me but I can understand why people leave when the game developers decide to throw obstacles in front of them and mask incovenience as immersion or as gameplay. It's not. Flying mounts disconnecting you from the world is fine because the world itself is a massive disconnect. Simple removing flying mounts will not reconnect you to do it, all it will do is make you feel slightly annoyed and inconvenienced. Their is no connection, no immersion back down that path. Their is only continued subscriber loss.

Look in mists they tried to embrace so many painfully stupid and regressive ideas and not only did it NOT stem the tide of sub loss it only served to exarcebate it. Why do you think continuing to rob players of convenience is a good thing? Why do you think masking inconvenience as immersion works? Do you not use the save game feature on your games anymore? I hope they do get rid of all of it. The only way this argument will ever be finished is if the developers embrace every idea they can and just tank the game. Then we can finally put the debate to rest.

Wow. No wonder the game is dying. It's filling with players who don't like MMORPGs.

[Glorious Leader]

Wow. No wonder the game is dying. It's filling with players who don't like MMORPGs.

And this is a shock to you because? MMOS were always a niche genre, wow was a success because it broke and ignored many of the conventions of that genre. Furthermore the conventions of the genre don't really work all that well anymore. Players have to much access to knowledge and information that breaks the connection to the game world. They know who the wizard behind the curtain is and he isn't from OZ.

[Korgoth]

The change in lore, the continuation of the LFR model, the new joke of a race, the new class, ability bloat, very poor balancing decisions, very poor item decisions, and a general lack of innovation.

[Robert3620]

Pet battles: MASSIVE amounts of time and effort put into that with no big response or want for it in any way. Sure maybe 10% of whats left of the population likes it, but the time spent on that could have gone into something 90% would of liked. Transmog needs to be taken out of this game, it has led to a lack of care for gear design on blizzards end since if people dont like it they just change it to w/e tier the go and farm out of MC. If you think that's wrong just poll the first group of people you see in a raid group, are they all in the new dull stuff or the old shiny stuff?

More people have 30 lvl 25 pets then have killed a single heroic boss. Pet battles is more popular then heroic raiding. Which do you think they spend more time on? By your logic they should stop using resources on heroic raiding and spend it on pet battles.

Pet battles has been a huge success this expansion. It maybe the single most popular thing this expansion has added.

[Healing Rain]

No flying in Pandaria until 90 was terrible.

[Vigilant]

Well, these were the things that didn't work for me:

1) Lack of compelling story. This might be more my fault than Blizzard's, though. I haven't really been compelled since we killed the Lich King. Every ounce of my toon felt consumed by the need to save the world from the Scourge in WoTLK. It fueled questing, made sense of instances, and motivated my doing dailies. I was far less compelled by the threat of Deatwing in Cata, but the revamp to Azeroth was enough to keep my interest pretty piqued. I haven't been engaged by MoP's story whatsoever, though.

2) Double gating (rep + valor) gear. Lame. So lame. Throw in the ability to champion factions via tabards while running dungeons and it would've only been 1/10th as lame, but forcing dailies upon us in this fashion really irked me.

3) Speaking of dungeons. The relative lack of dungeons, and the lack of quality in the ones given us, was really a turnoff for me. Might sound weird, but grinding 5-mans is how I spent the vast, vast majority of my time in WoTLK and Cata, with the occasional PuG raid thrown in. The dungeons in MoP have just been... belch. I assume this is due to the greater push to get people into raids instead via LFR, but whatevs. Still lame.

[Roujeaux]

This would be an especially good idea when also applied to leveling. Leveling scenarios, in my opinion, are a great missed opportunity by Blizzard. Quests get stale, dungeons are finite, etc. There is a huge untapped resource of scenarios, especially the ones that can't be done in Heroic, like Greenstone Village.

I thought the same thing. Leveling scenarios placed properly within the story of a zone (max level zones too) would fulfill
their original intent as queue based group (or solo) quests, and add another avenue for leveling experience/rewards in addition to questing and dungeons. I really don't see their purpose beyond that, especially at max levels. (Perfect example would be if Battle For Undercity, one of the best quests of all time, was brought back as a scenario.)

[Frogged]

This is simple untrue. The game has also ROBBED so much player convenience and has just put players out for well no reason.

What was robbed from you this expansion? Alts are easier to progress than any expansion to date. Is there something else I'm missing?

Conveneience doesn't make a game fun or not but inconvenience can certainly make a game unfun.

This is opinion, as was mine. Tell me, though. If you add more and more convenience to a game, it becomes shorter and shorter. There is only so much content a developer can create. Would you find a good game to continue to hold it's high regard in your mind if it were only 30 minutes long? The answer for me would be no. I want to spend time playing games, not just finish games for the sake of finishing games.

Boredom for you is a welcome addition for the guy who can only afford to put in so much time for the game. Would you go back to the days when you didn't have saved games and had to input codes? Saved games were a huge convenience..

Saved games aren't a convenience. They're a necessity. A human being cannot physically sit in front of a game for hundreds of hours without risking their health. This is very, very different from convenience.

Mists has lot's that isn't convenient about it like no flying for alts is another big one.

I am actually in support of having flying for alts. The point of removing flying in MoP during leveling was so you could see the content. But if you've seen it once, you earn the right to fly over it. The same can be said for alts. You saw it on your main and you should have earned the right to fly over and ignore it. Flying for your first character would be a bad idea, though.

As for your experience with lei shen I would submit you are extremely atypical. I mean I finished my alt a couple of days ago and I still haven't seen lei shen but I didn't play like a mad man.

I would argue that your experience, not mine, is atypical. Almost everyone I talk to or hear from has the same experience as me. Very little time spent, almost not gold spent, and you can reach and kill Lei Shen within a day of reaching 90. It all comes down to the treasure run and having 20 Elder Charms for t14.

Once again the casuals aren't the problem, the people who play for extended ridiculous periods of time are because they force the developers to design around THEM and not from the bottom up.

Except Blizzard doesn't listen to the hardcores. If they did, LFR, LFD, and a number of other systems would be gone. As would Normal modes. I would argue the opposite, that Blizzard caters to casuals who are unsure what they want in anticipation of a short-term gain in money and subscriptions, instead of investing long-term in people who are devoted to their game and aren't unsure about their approach.

[Wirzy]

There is no content for alters, at least for me. Let see:

Dungeons/scenarios: They are a rush even with green gear, no mechanics, just loot piñata. At least at cata I could run dungeons with alters and have fun. I could say that I leveled alters on cata for the dungeons.

BG: So if I farm honor gear, it is still crap gear for bgs, so no way

World PvP: Random PvE guy appears and oneshots the alter, gg. But I use my mage to pull oondasta/Nalak to the horde which is a lot of fun.

LFR: afk, zzzzz....

Dailies: Again? Hell NO

Challenge dungeons: I don't even care about doing them with my main, so...

HC Scenario: That is the only feature I like to do with alters, but the bag drops once a day and I got tired of logging on alters every day.

Achiv/mounts/pets: Nope

Just now I have 3 90s; 2 88s and 4 85s. I can't see the point of leveling the rest. For what?

[Stryk]

The game is almost nine years old and still has 7.7 million subscriptions. I'd say the game is doing pretty well considering the fact that WoW is no longer new and fresh like when it first came out.

[Glorious Leader]

What was robbed from you this expansion? Alts are easier to progress than any expansion to date. Is there something else I'm missing?



This is opinion, as was mine. Tell me, though. If you add more and more convenience to a game, it becomes shorter and shorter. There is only so much content a developer can create. Would you find a good game to continue to hold it's high regard in your mind if it were only 30 minutes long? The answer for me would be no. I want to spend time playing games, not just finish games for the sake of finishing games.



Saved games aren't a convenience. They're a necessity. A human being cannot physically sit in front of a game for hundreds of hours without risking their health. This is very, very different from convenience.



I am actually in support of having flying for alts. The point of removing flying in MoP during leveling was so you could see the content. But if you've seen it once, you earn the right to fly over it. The same can be said for alts. You saw it on your main and you should have earned the right to fly over and ignore it. Flying for your first character would be a bad idea, though.



I would argue that your experience, not mine, is atypical. Almost everyone I talk to or hear from has the same experience as me. Very little time spent, almost not gold spent, and you can reach and kill Lei Shen within a day of reaching 90. It all comes down to the treasure run and having 20 Elder Charms for t14.



Except Blizzard doesn't listen to the hardcores. If they did, LFR, LFD, and a number of other systems would be gone. As would Normal modes. I would argue the opposite, that Blizzard caters to casuals who are unsure what they want in anticipation of a short-term gain in money and subscriptions, instead of investing long-term in people who are devoted to their game and aren't unsure about their approach.

Alts were far easier to progress in cataclysm especially with tabards and with 7/day to cap valor and no needless double gating and catch up dungeons. Now those dungeons may have been harder to accomplish but that's okay because I'm in favor of easy dungeons with gear as well.

If the content in the game is so shallow that the only way to keep it going long enough is to make TRAVEL a ridiculous and arbitrary grind to keep me subbed then the developers have bigger problems.

Saved games are not a necessity. They weren't for much of video gaming history. I could argue flying mounts are a necessity. Their were lots of methods in the past for continuing games without physical memory, see saved game codes or check points. Saving a game at any point is a huge CONVENIENCE and one that is almost now universally accepted.

No your experience is definetly atypical and not how the developers have designed it. How much time did you put since you hit 90? How much luck did you have? How many coins did you roll on? We need more details but the reality is to kill lfr lei shen in one day you need a pretty good mixture of time investment and luck. The caps on lfr, coins and the weekly barrens crap is proof enough of that. Even 20 coins isn't enough often. Very very few people are killing lei shen on day one at lvl 90, especially if their new to this game and especially if they don't have hours and hours to commit to it. You committed hours to it, got extremely lucky or frankly are full of shit. Hell just completing all the lfrs back to back (never mind the ILVL requirement) is a good day at least. An hour in que and then an hour for each (more likely hour and half or 2 hours).

No Blizzard did listen to the hardcores, it's just that totality of your wishes and wants are so obviously unreasonable that not all of them can be listened to. Getting rid of lfr and lfd are good examples of that. Those are obviously here to stay and it would be best if you recognized they are here to stay. Now you won't do this and instead you'll rail on about how you get ignored even though that simple isn't true. For the amount of the player base that we could label or dub "hardcore" you've gotten more than your numbers probably deserve. They have bean counters to listen to and the bean counters determine much of what goes on in the games. Like that's the best part you don't even realize how unrealistic your wishes are and when the developers (naturally) don't heed to those wishes you automatically think they haven't listened to when they've done nothing but listen to you or at least acceded to your desires far more than they should have. That's entitlement btw.. I mean that's real entitlement not what get's labeled entitlement.

[Surfd]

I love my main but I get bored of playing the same class or characters all the time, so, like in wrath and cata, I like to play alts.. then remember.. jesus, I need to grind months of dailies to get anything on him/her.

That might have been true if you were bringing up an alt within the first month or two of Mists launch. Current mists is INSANELY alt friendly, what with the changes they made in response to all the people who pointed out how hard it was early on. Especially with the double rep bonus you get for any daily faction. You can literally hit exalted with pretty much any faction except August Celestials in less then a week. Even quicker if you kill a few warbringers / warscouts for rep tokens (2k rep per token with the rep bonus adds up fast).

Add to that the changes made to the Justice Point gear / valor gear gating, and the addition of the Isle of Thunder / Battlefield Barrens stuff, and you can be LFR ready within a week at most, and into ToT in your second week tops. Honestly, If you are having trouble getting an alt up to speed, you are probably doing something wrong.

Hell, Since I mainly do LFR, and love to have alts for tradeskills, I tend to have fun messign with my alts once my main caps out on Valor for the week. I now have 3 characters who will probably be finished the Legendary Cloak questline up to its current point by time the next patch hits, and all I really do is run ToT LFR once a week and maybe do a Heroic Scenario or two.

[Vigilant]

No Blizzard did listen to the hardcores, it's just that totality of your wishes and wants are so obviously unreasonable that not all of them can be listened to. Getting rid of lfr and lfd are good examples of that. Those are obviously here to stay and it would be best if you recognized they are here to stay. Now you won't do this and instead you'll rail on about how you get ignored even though that simple isn't true. For the amount of the player base that we could label or dub "hardcore" you've gotten more than your numbers probably deserve. They have bean counters to listen to and the bean counters determine much of what goes on in the games. Like that's the best part you don't even realize how unrealistic your wishes are and when the developers (naturally) don't heed to those wishes you automatically think they haven't listened to when they've done nothing but listen to you.

I am definitely, definitely, definitely not a hardcore (I haven't downed a singled normal mode boss in either Cata or MoP), but even I think LFR is really contributing to lessening the quality of WoW.

[Glorious Leader]

I am definitely, definitely, definitely not a hardcore (I haven't downed a singled normal mode boss in either Cata or MoP), but even I think LFR is really contributing to lessening the quality of WoW.

Based on what I might ask? It strikes me that to have an opinion on the quality of that content one should partake in that content. It sounds like you're forum crusading.


Understand I'm not pro lfr or anti lfr. I'm only pro lfr in a universe where raiding is all consuming. Well if raiding takes a back seat and you get 4 bosses every year or so then I'm fine with lfr going the way of the dinosaur. As long as we have big raid tiers with loads of bosses then LFR is here to stay and should stay.

[Dessan]

I agree with those who said it's not alt friendly, but that isn't everything I think declined subs.

I think that having content that was new deterred a lot of players. As whacky as that seems, WoW is still a very loyal fanbase with a lot of people having played the WC RTS games, a brand new story that had absolutely no predecessor in terms of lore really wasn't smart. I get that they have to introduce new story content, but if you give the fans a good basis or this then they'll stick with it, but bringing up something out of the blue seemed a weird side step.

To make that easier to understand, MoP felt like a side quest. A ide quest that was picked up randomly and never really explained unil the very end, if we had learnt throughout Cata that Y'Shaarj was around and influencing things people would have felt more compelled to see throuh Pandaria, but because it was told the way it was, it was almost like introducing someone to a new game. MMO's should stay fresh, but they should rarely give out the majority of their content based on what they want to do with it, without first letting the player base get a glimpse and also feeling like it's a problem that needs solving.

And yes you could say they've been doing this, but they kinda need to do it for every expansion, not just the major boss ones, there's absolutely nothing wrong with basing an expansion around 2 ultimate evils just to allow for an end boss and something that's just butting heads along the way. End bosses don't always have to be huge lore characters, just ones we actually know about and care about the end result of.

Everyone wanted to kill Arthas, everyone wanted to kill Illidan, and ofc everyone wanted to kill Deathwing cuz he was being a bit of a d**k. But where was that in MoP? Sure we get to take out Garrosh, and we knew it from the get go, but I really, REALLY doubt that we'd even have a 7.7 mil player base if they hadn't forewarned us of what was coming.

A lot of people moan about mechanics, and the way the game is built around the more casual plaer, but they're ignoring that Blizzard is STILL catering to all of it's fanbase in terms of gameplay, but what they're really not doing is introducing new characters that stick, make the player feel sympathy for them, giving them villians that nt only feel strong, but act in a way that they'd oppose i they were their character,

Again I think a lot of MMORPG's have lost the RPG element, gearing doesn't feel like role playing, it feels like leveling up. Just a lot slower. Give us the good story, onsomething we can relate and we shall stay forever, but give us what you want to give us, and know that not everyone will like it.

Nothing wrong with new story content, but don't spring it on us from the blue allow it to build up, heck imo there should have been indications in TBC about a threat we don't yet have to deal with but we know one day we'll get there. It's going to work out much better if people know "Ok these are the current bad guys in WoW, heck this is even a priority list for killing them, who's currently the most problematic for peace on Azeroth?" Afterall, isn't that what WoW is about? Creating peace on a planet that's going through a tonne of problems?

Give us content we can relate to, not content you WANT us to relate to. But since you can make us relate to that content, put the work in early and you'll see the benefits.

I'm not even saying they should be like "Omg we need an end boss for Expac 6, so lets put clues in expac 4!" I want there to be all these subtle hints throughout the world that let us theorize, and almost prepare for what is coming. I mean, the earth know when asteroids are going to hit to a certain degree of accuracy, why can't we know when a malevolent force is planning an uprising? Does every single one of them hide secrets so well that we only know the moment it begins? No. It's just lazy writing, as if they're only focused on current content, which really I don't think you can be anymore.

Havve Expac 8 boss clues in Expac 2, have Expac 9 clues in Expac 4, don't keep a system, make it widely known that shit's gonnz go down, we just have no way of dealing with it until the enemy makes their move and no way of knowing exactly when it's going to happen. That way when an expansion comes out focused around a certain villain, people know why they're attacking and people will relate, the newer fanbase hasn't got the greatest grip of lore as it is so it still won't affect the, but it does allow the veterans a chance to look back and say "We'll I've been waiting to kill this bitch for 5 expacs, so damn well right I'm gonna do it."

Also, if people are quitting WoW due to the current systems in place, they shouldn't get their hopes up for other MMOs, because it won't be long in the future that all of these other games have to resort to the same things as WoW to keep their fanbases up.

[Deleted]

Apart from being burnt out in general with the game having played for many years,

Having to do dailies to get rep for gear earlier in the expansion and now having to do them to get coins for raids.

Having to do LFR loads to gear up alts and do even more dailies on them each week.

Still having to progress through normal to get to heroic modes, playing through essentially the same content twice with mostly bigger numbers gets boring especially when combined with doing the LFR version too on alts, would much rather heroic mode not require gear from normals but thats not gonna change. I want to clear the raids once through on hard like I would do a normal single player game.

Having to do multiple tiers of LFR on alts for gear/legendary questline, LFR is annoying enough as it is but ended up doing so much of it this expansion to gear alts for actual raids for when they were needed or If I wanted to switch mains.

Raids although mostly fun, the actual villains this expansion really haven't been that interesting to me like previous expansions because there has not been a "main" villain we are just getting bosses that we have little background/buildup compared to tbc or wrath, the Sha just don't live up to Illidan/LK.

[Auxis]

Yea, they really do. Unless you like to lvl and then unsub.

Last time I checked, LFR's and Dailies aren't necessary to raid.

[SL1200]

The End boss is my own faction leader. /facepalm

[Vigilant]

Based on what I might ask? It strikes me that to have an opinion on the quality of that content one should partake in that content. It sounds like you're forum crusading.

Understand I'm not pro lfr or anti lfr. I'm only pro lfr in a universe where raiding is all consuming. Well if raiding takes a back seat and you get 4 bosses every year or so then I'm fine with lfr going the way of the dinosaur. As long as we have big raid tiers with loads of bosses then LFR is here to stay and should stay.

I dunno. I didn't get to see the inside of Naxx or Ulduar until after Cata dropped, and I only got to go in ToGC once with a PuG. I did get to farm ICC trash for rep rings, though, and then cleared 10/12 with the 30% buff.

By contrast, I have seen every raid instance and downed every boss in MoP via LFR.

I'll tell you which experience was WAY more epic, though - my WotLK one.

I guess I just feel like Blizzard has gone on this little crusade of making content accessible to everyone, with the unintended consequence of producing content that isn't even worth accessing.

I honestly feel like a scaling buff like ICC had is a way better solution than the nerfed mechanics in LFR that basically turn everything into tank and spank.

I never used to be able to get my foot in the door of raids because being married, kids, grad school, you name it just isn't conducive to being in a raiding guild. But because content wasn't accessible, it was way more desirable. I always dreamed of seeing raids, which created something worth playing towards - maxing out all my drops from heroics, whatever I could get from rep, crafting, etc., watching strategy vids on TankSpot, and then finally getting a chance to get in the place and try my hand at it. It was an epic experience.

You might be able to just chalk that all up to nostalgia, though.

[Frieght]

I found, and others in my guild, the solo instances to be a god awful experience. Something about them is just such a pain in the ass. They feel tuned to high and like im on a frickin rail, you have no choice but to execute the thing in the only way its designed. Open world is OPEN!!!! for a reason... so your not required to play like a dang turret section from one of the many Terrible shooters that have been made.

I feel like LFR has belittled the meaningful nature raiding had in prior expansions. Why try and play well or get into a raiding guild, or even start a raid team within a guild, if you can click the "Find Me Loot" button and just faceroll content? I want to say it would work out better if gearing didn't involve LFR if you didn't want to use it, like if you could get LFR, or near LFR, level gear from heroics. The 5 man feels like it was replaced buy LFR and neither seem fun after a few weeks, then if you get into raiding your half way to burned out on raiding from having to gear up 70-80% of the way through LFR. Why not have a level 90 difficulty for instances, so that ALL instances for the expac have a pre 90 and post 90 difficulty, Then have heroic modes that feel meaningful through proper tuning and gear drops. The fact that heroics drop 1 epic from the final boss is really off putting to me, someone who first hit max level in wrath and enjoyed gearing up for the most part.

Hope this thread gets a good looking over by the devs.