Mass burnout.

[Berengil]

I really wonder if all the theorycrafters, guide writers, discord content creators etc. left, what would people do? I constantly see people asking for short & sweet answers to dilemmas like:
- which class should I play?
- which spec of the class should I invest into?
- which race is the best for my class / spec?
- which of these trinkets / legendaries is better?
- what are my stat prios / stat weights / softcaps?
- macros / weak auras to copy
- why am I not topping dps meter, what am I doing wrong?

Now what if all these people were left to their own devices instead of having pre-packaged sources of answers...

Which class? I have never asked that of anyone in the 8 yrs I have been playing.
Same for which spec.
Same for which race.
Which gear is better? Generally the one with more stats.
Stat priority/weights/softcaps? Theorycrafting unneeded to experience 99% of the game. And that 1%? Mythics and rated pvp that take too much of the Dev's attention relative to the number of people overall who play it.
macros/auras? more deep gameplay stuff unneeded in casual play.
Dps meter? see above.

Personally, I pick a spec, and play it to the best of my ability without almost any out-of-game homework. And you can finish 99% of the game doing just that.

Legion is the best xpac yet for people who don't push the bleeding edge of content. As for those who do .... well, you can grind till your eyes bleed to keep up, join us down here in "story mode", or quit, as you prefer.

[MoanaLisa]

Honestly why not just move the whole game offline and make it a solo experience? That seems to be what most people really want.

Not at all. I enjoy playing with friends and family. I think most people do if they have that chance. What is questionable is whether or not people want to put up with a significant chance of having to associate with random internet strangers on the verge of a nerdrage temper tantrum.

[IceMan1763]

It's all about no sense of gear progression. A lot of people (even though many deny it) are after the upgrades or simply improving their character/raiding power. Unfortunately gear has no effect on it whatsoever.

Longer explanation here (TLDR go to 11:30):

Exactly, character improvement/progression comes from outside of raiding now. M+ gear with perfect TF and RNG, legiondaries, and AP.

Note that character improvement has nothing to do with the skill of the player or "hard work/effort" as some like to claim. It just takes a massive amount of time (luck doesn't hurt either).

[Deleted]

Legion has a lot of stuff to do and burning oneself out is really easy to do.
(...)
I think that for people who can't self moderate, the risk of burnout is very real.

WotLK also had a lot to do, and I played a lot more back then. Yet I never felt burnt out.

It's not about the amount of stuff to do; it's about the quality, and above all, the spirit of the stuff to do. And WoW has lost its spirit quite some time ago.

The endless grind for AP and RNG rewards combined with the 1000% worthless reputation vendor rewards are killing the purpose of the dailies. The RNG especially. Previously you could at least set a goal (such as a piece of gear from a vendor) and work to achieve it. Now you have no goals, just eternal grind. We are basically floating in nothingness without a direction, with no fixed points whatsoever. That is the problem.

[Grimnakh]

It's all about no sense of gear progression. A lot of people (even though many deny it) are after the upgrades or simply improving their character/raiding power. Unfortunately gear has no effect on it whatsoever.

Longer explanation here (TLDR go to 11:30):

The gear has plenty of effect and there still plenty of progression for mythic raiders. Unless all their gear is WF already theres gonna be steady increases in power by running it every week, much faster as long as you arent wiping dozens of times per boss than getting gear anywhwere else. I can see it as a valid complaint if the mythic mechanics are preventing kill time of bosses from going down much though, but if youre 1 or 3 shotting now and were wiping a ton its still a huge relief from progression weeks. Most likely theyre just not happy that the progression isnt more dramatic than in previous expansions, and if youve farmed mythic + and herioc for weeks before getting a mythic boss down, with only killing a few mythic bosses than ya, your group isnt going to have a huge leap in power any time soon. Thats part of the smooth (a concequence of a great WF/TF system that makes it slow and smooth, somewhat AP for more casual guilds/ones carrying less involved players) progression mechanics. So the content remains challenging longer. Not sure thats entirely a bad thing, but I can see people wanting to get to farm phase faster, its certainly more relaxing.

[ehxy]

It's all about no sense of gear progression. A lot of people (even though many deny it) are after the upgrades or simply improving their character/raiding power. Unfortunately gear has no effect on it whatsoever.

Longer explanation here (TLDR go to 11:30):

This is exactly it.

[Sastank]

Flakes are in every guild. Keep up recruitment and try moreso week of 7.2, time for people to come back and do whatever before raid releases. Armory apps and see if they're just coming back or they've been subbed throughout. Less likely to get more flakes/burnouts.

[Kazgrel]

Replacing one theorycrafters with another doesn't really picture a situation where they all left, just usual generational exchange, some left, some came. And yes, I agree if they all left it would probably mean the game is in a complete apathetic / abandoned state and no one really cares anymore, no one is passionate about it.

Even on the levels of gameplay where optimizing is not necessary people keep asking these questions, and expect easy canned answers. There is a reason why threads like "which class / race / etc. should I pick?" are not allowed on MMO-champ. People have the freedom to pick a class and race yet they ask someone else to decide for them?

They do it in every game. They copy-paste builds and gear setups in diablo. They copy-paste decks in hearthstone. And so forth.

"I wanna be the very best, just like all the rest"...something to that effect.

[Deleted]

It's all about no sense of gear progression. A lot of people (even though many deny it) are after the upgrades or simply improving their character/raiding power. Unfortunately gear has no effect on it whatsoever.

I think the burnout comes out of the nature of the game. Meaning the game is all about numbers, gear improvement and DPS and it's not a action game so playing it is not exactly "fun" and addicting like other action games.

And when all the fun of a game comes out of numbers, when you reach your limit skill wall and you can no longer "improve your numbers" you get bored and burned out very easily.

[Rotomon]

Attendance through outt the expansion has always been an issue. You will always get the FOTM players who pop in for a couple weeks when a new tier launches then they drift away. I've experienced this trend since day one. When I get bored I play less when I'm not bored I play more. When I'm really bored I play other games and only log in for raid nights.

[InfiniteCharger]

I really think the fault lies almost entirely with the players (yes, I know this is going to trigger a bunch of people who don't understand the concept of personal accountability - they can deal with it).



Making AP endlessly available was good because it allowed people who enjoyed doing more content a way to keep getting rewarded for their play. The problem you refer to isn't the fault of AP being endlessly available, it's the fault of players being unable to play sensibly. It's like you say, they felt compelled. It's down to their own emotional failings.




This was true on a "per character" level, but the simple fact of the matter is that no artificial cap has ever been able to stop players from finding ways of turning even more time spent playing into an advantage.

I present Exhibit A: The split run. This is classic example of how top end raiders found a way around the weekly raid boss lockout. They spend twice as much time in the game to level up 2 characters and then run the raid twice, funneling all the gear to one of their characters. Effectively it becomes a way for their main to run the instance twice (or three or four times depending on how much time they are willing to spend levelling up even more alts).

In the end, things are exactly the same as they have always been: The player chooses how much time to spend advancing their power and is responsible for managing that. The difference now is that they have simply made it so that players no longer have to jump through convoluted hoops to do this. If you want to focus all your power on your main, you can do that without rolling alts and finding other imaginative ways to circumvent the barriers.

Why do you think blizzard is refunding AP?

Because they don't want raid bosses downed on the first day of the next raid.

Whose fault is that? Not the players.

If the game designers announce to the world "I am building the possibility for you to gain INFINITE power" in a game, then whose fault is it that some players try to gain infinite power?

Please. You cannot really claim this is the players fault.

In reality the game does not have infinite scaling on bosses in raids. Therefore they tune their bosses to a certain level based previously on gear and even before that resistances, buffs and so forth.

This time around AP is the new X-factor along with titan forging and BIS legendary weapons. They actually gamed themselves by this system because if the game really offers "infinite power" progression, then it doesn't matter if everybody does it or only relatively few, somebody is going to attempt to and reach very large levels of power. And then what? Oh, my bad, the raids are too easy we need to redo the AP system..... LOL.

That is just funny.

If they really were serious about this AP progression system they would have actually built the game so it would survive the potential for some players to go into a read with max AP for NH. But they didn't and that is their fault. Now they have to redo AP in order to provide some semblance of difficulty for the next raid tier.... I can not say that they intended it to be this way from the beginning but still that's what they get for advertising and promoting this new power progression system.

True to fact, WOW is not like Diablo III. There is no infinite progression system in WOW because everything is capped and there is no real infinite difficulty scale. Raids only have 3 modes. There is no mythic+ for raids. Infinite progression only somewhat applies to Mythic+ dungeons and even then it is capped. It just seems infinite because they are repeatable. Most of what they call infinite progression is simply an illusion because there are only so many traits you can get on any weapon. Therefore they should have just said up front, the game will start with a cap of 54 (or 32) AP for the first raid tier and then the cap will be raised to 54 in the next major raid tier patch..... No need for refunds. No worries about bosses being under tuned over tuned.

[Marrilaife]

When I get bored I play less when I'm not bored I play more. When I'm really bored I play other games and only log in for raid nights.

The problem aren't players like you. People who want to only log for raids, don't grind and play other games meanwhile can always play on a more casual level and be fine with it. What's not fine is people who when they're bored they "forget" to log for raid nights and "forget" to mention it to GM / officer that they're in fact quitting, not giving GM / officers time to recruit extra people, and no, you don't want to over-recruit and have people leave because they sat too much on the bench.

It's the same problem with guilds disbanding, yes, another one can try to snatch a few players for themlseves, but no guild can fit let's say 7 extra members on the same day, you can snatch 2-3 and when you again take a dent in the roster the remaining players already transferred away because they wanted to raid instead of sitting idle waiting for some spots to open. That's especially a problem on a low to medium pop servers where there are very few guilds in mythic, often separated by wide gaps in progression speed. I still don't know why Blizzard stopped the merges and didn't do anything since MOP, semi-dead servers are in the biggest pinch overall.

[Doffen]

I get all my upgrades from the weekly chest.

Screenshot or it didn't happen! Someones lucky!!

Or wait, you talking about the chest of weekly disappointment right? Du dum dum 3 storm relics in chest 3 weeks in a row. Nice compliment to the 6 boots, 11 belts and 8 cloaks I've gotten from there.

[Super Kami Dende]

I'm not burnt out. I just find times in between patches to catch up on other games. I rarely know any people that play WoW and only WoW every night 365days a year.

- - - Updated - - -

I don't understand how people can stop raiding and just leave their guild without enough players to raid. It's incredibly rude and disrespectful

Because People can choose pretty easily to stop doing something they don't enjoy doing? If I get bored of Raiding I stop Raiding. I don't really care if other people want me to keep Raiding.

[The Stormbringer]

I'm a little burned out, personally. I've been playing since late Vanilla, but I've barely touched this expansion past the first couple of months. I loved the pre-launch event, though!

[Marrilaife]

If I get bored of Raiding I stop Raiding. I don't really care if other people want me to keep Raiding.

Would be nice if you at least told them? Or is it like the relationships these days, people don't tell the other person they're breaking up, they just stop answering phones and change status on FB.

[Deleted]

If the guild were NPC's sure. But your guild mates are real people that need you to show up.

This also means they dont treat WoW as a game. Otherwise, they would just say " oh well, no raid today, lets go to bed or play something else" without drama or whining. Im doing that, at least.

[Lastlivingsoul]

Would be nice if you at least told them? Or is it like the relationships these days, people don't tell the other person they're breaking up, they just stop answering phones and change status on FB.

That's the new trend in Wow lately. Basically the entire raiding team decides one night to leave the guild to join another guild that already can complete mythic raiding with their team leaving everyone left in the guild without any tanks or healers to pick up the pieces. Seen it happen twice now and I have lost touch with alot of those who have felt the burn.

[Twdft]

If the game designers announce to the world "I am building the possibility for you to gain INFINITE power" in a game, then whose fault is it that some players try to gain infinite power?

Please. You cannot really claim this is the players fault.

But game designer in WoW also implemented diminishing returns on artifact/mythic+ farm. If you see this and still nolife your way through then yes, it is the players fault.

[Niwes]

Dear OP,

maybe your guildies finally realized that "the grind is real!", that this sucks and that they, finally, get nothing out of it and that it is totally worthless, since you just have to sit down and waiting for next big patch, when you get all the hard grinded shit for free. So they, maybe, came to the conclusion, that Legion is a horrible "carrot on a stick" moneymaker game from activision bli$$ard and pissed on it.

maybe...