Looks like you missed the very next statement then:
-Dailies were only mildly interesting.
This points to the fact OP took into account the Molten Front.
I never even did the prequests on any of my alts because it felt extremely painful to do those dailies twice or thrice a day. So i agree with TheDDGuides.
You should consider reading a bit more next time.
The wrong direction for WoW is the direction that kills WoW. Making group-oriented activities required will kill the game. The market and the interest is not there. There might be 500,000 people who want to play a version of WoW where you can't play the "cool" or endgame parts of the game on your own. There might (but I strongly doubt it) be 1,000,000 people who would do that. But there are definitely not 10,000,000 people who would play that game. There aren't 5,000,000. There aren't 2,000,000.
If you want to play a game supported by a half million subscribers, you have lots of choices. If you want to play the MMORPG that dominates all the others by an incredible margin, and has done so since its release, well, I think you have to look at how the game has evolved and maybe give the designers a little credit for not turning it into a niche game like ALL OF THE OTHER MMORPGs IN THE WORLD ARE NOW.
All the scrapped content and rather disappointing final raid. I think the best part of Cata was the old world revamp.
i'm mad they never did a raid in that throne of the tides area. they even had a portal there
Maybe what they had was just bad. I think that the bitching about the raid that never happened is probably about 1/10 the bitching that would have occurred if a terrible Vash raid had been deployed.
Aside from that, 3-d zones are a cool idea but WoW is not a good 3-d game and it isn't obvious how it could be turned into one. I don't know how the people who got realm first Archaeology kept their sanity. Probably the people who did, just ignored the dig sites in Vash, or got lucky and didn't have any.
Don't assume that because something you didn't like didn't happen, the people in charge are idiots. Sometimes, or maybe often, they are protecting you from something amazingly worse.
Why exactly would making raiding a player organised activity kill the game?
Raiding has always been a niche part of the game even with LFR now a days. I remember reading a post that 2 mio did LFR in cata that is far from those 10 mio who subscribed to the game...
Why things that require a group would kill the game I do not know it is a rather incridibly bold statement, backed up by nothing, or would you mind showing me all your market surveys and interest focus group research that you apparently are referring to?
I've always felt that there's one very simple reason for Cataclysm's lack of success -- the absence of new game features.
We had plenty more of the same stuff we were used to (a whole lot more, really), but the problem was that the devs did nothing to change the way we play through that content. There was nothing that fundamentally altered the everyday business of logging into WoW, doing your quests, leveling your alts, or running some dungeons. It was the same gameplay with a new coat of paint.
Every other expansion has introduced a whole ton of new systems that radically shake up how we experience the game.
TBC had flying mounts, heroic dungeons, the justice gearing system, brand new raid sizes, daily quests, a "new" class for each faction, etc.
In Wrath we got some massive improvements to questing, 10/25-man sizes on all raids, the concept of hard modes, far more accessible heroics, dual spec, a brand new class, a brand new type of world BG, dungeon finder, and so on.
Pandaria has had arguably the most new features of all. Pet battles, challenge modes, another brand new class, (worthwhile) rare hunting, farming, the brawlers guild, scenarios, soon heroic scenarios, changing up how valour is acquired, and probably a bunch more stuff as the expansion continues.
Cataclysm had... guild leveling? Did that really change the way you play? It was more like something passive that happened in the background. Archaeology? I guess archaeology counts. It was only in the final content patch of Cataclysm that we really got some awesome new features (LFR and transmogrification) that shook things up and gave the game a breath of fresh air. It's also worth noting that this was the only expansion where none of the BGs (aside from Tol Barad, perhaps) introduced a new game mode; they were just different arrangements of WSG and AB.
I'm 99% certain this is the overwhelming reason for Cataclysm's stagnation. Simply because it did stagnate. You can argue whether many of the features I've listed are positive or negative ones in their own right, but you can't dispute that they did change the way the game was played.
Change is good. Change is what keeps you playing the same game for eight years. It has its ups and downs, but there's always something new and interesting for you to try out, and that's what keeps your interest.
Fortunately, given the direction of Pandaria, I think Blizzard have absolutely realised that this was the problem in Cataclysm, and since then we've been seeing a slew of game-changing updates with almost every patch.
@op:
1. Blizzard killed 25 man raiding.
2. WOTLK Raid guilds disbanded or switched to 10-man mode, which left many former DPS without a raid guild. Being unable to raid b/c they could find no guild, many people -including me- quit CATA.
I only tried CATA for a month or so (I had quit back in WOTLK days) and when I returned, about 60% of my friend list returned "character does not exist". Almost all my friends had stopped playing and my WOTLK aid guild had switched to 10 man mode. They later quit too. There is no point playing a game when all the people you knew stopped playing it.
MoP continued on the same model which is one of the reasons why they are losing subs like we have told Blizzard hundreds of times already.Originally Posted by det
Last edited by Sturmbringe; 2013-05-05 at 04:06 PM.
Veteran vanilla player - I was 31 back in 2005 when I started playing WoW - Nostalrius raider with a top raid guild.
That bit about Arthas simply isn't true. Arthas is all over the place in WotLK, and you still see him again and again when you're just leveling through. In nearly every zone you encounter him in a big way if you follow certain questlines through to completion, and you even see him in some dungeons - CoT: Stratholme obviously but also Drak'tharon Keep if you have the quests. Finally, even when you aren't looking him in the face or interacting with him directly, you are constantly hearing about him or rumors of war and wars to come. To say Arthas is never shown in WotLK is either willful amnesia or ignorance, or you're just lying through your teeth.
That's because everything to do with Thrall in Cata sucked. Oh, look, the poor Orc has doubts about who he is, and what he's done, and where his life is going. So freaking what? Every human being that's ever lived has the same doubts at points in their lives.
Not true. I didn't have to read anything to know that the Burning Legion are demonic in nature and bad for everyone. I didn't need to read up on Arthas to know that someone named the LICH king, that controlled scores of unthinking undead, was bad for everyone. What's Deathwing's story? I don't know. I know who Cairne and Aggra are, and I didn't have to read a book to find out. And I don't care about the twilight cult. I didn't when Cata came out, and I don't now.You noted that you need to read the books to get a grasp on Deathwing's motives; you need to read the books to understand anything that is going on ever. Cairne's dead? Who's this Aggra? Why do we care about this twilight cult?
And come on - half of the Twilight Highlands, the zone they're supposed to be concentrated in - was full of quests to do what? Plan a wedding. And then halfway through the zone, suddenly it was "Oh, right - better get back to those Twilight cult guys now that the party planning's done."
My take:
-scattered, on-rails, at times unfocused zones made end game leveling feel a lot less interesting.
-DW wasn't overly compelling as a main baddie. You had to go back and play low level content to find out more about him at times, which was a poor design choice.
-chaos orbs had terrible implementation, which resulted in a gearblock for many players (which in turn, made those players feel as if progression was too slow)
-the troll heroics being the only ones "worth" doing was a mistake
-DS was a letdown after how much it was hyped, and remained current for far too long.
-lots of character / area recycling meant that 80-85 content felt a bit compromised.
-Tol Barad wasn't a particularly fun PvP zone (certainly not as well thought out as Wintergrasp)
So basically, you went to a bunch of places he WAS, and fixed what he DID.
Protip: you don't stop an arsonist just by putting out the fires he set.
The same antagonist, that in the cinematic, flew all the way to Stormwind, set down on the gates...So again what about Cataclysm made the antagonist so distant? And the BS about him being not being in any other game is bad. He was a character in lore before Arthas, Illidan, Kael'thas. Warcraft II . . .
And then buggered off again to fly around the world randomly torching zones.
Yeah, that's epic all right.
And every point you made about DW could be made about Arthas. You see him very soon after you enter Northrend. In Howling Fjord and Borean Tundra you deal with the Scourge and the Valkyr. Dragonblight is where Naxx ended up, for Pete's sake - not to mention the Scourge directly below it that you have to work through. Zul'Drak? Nothing but Scourge corruption there - fighting off the Trolls that were breeding new armies for him, and working with the Ebon Blade. And Icecrown was where the Scourge fight really took off - from the moment you enter the zone, you're fighting against some of the Lich King's more powerful forces. Only Grizzly Hills and Storm Peaks didn't seem to have quite as much Scourge action as the others, and it was still there.
So tell me again what a special snowflake ol' DW is.
Will I get burned at stake if I said that I dont think Cata failed?
It didnt fail
it had some of the most fun fights, such as sinestra, and nefarian heroic ....... but faaar too many shit boring fights, the whole of DS was a joke and was just incredibly boring... Ragnaros heroic was a really difficult fight, but again, long and incredibly boring
I've never played WC2, and I only played half of WC3, and that was after Cata came out.
And I STILL knew and cared more about Arthas/Lich King and what he was up to/why he was up to it that I do even now about Deathwing.
And someone made the point that DW went around torching whole zones and killing everything in them. Well, if he has that much power, and wanted to destroy that badly...
Why didn't he just, oh, I dunno... Do it?
Isle of Quel'Danas - self-contained questing zone with raid. Firelands - self-contained questing zone with raid.- 4.2 - you just outright ignored a whole unique question zone, not sure if you expect to be taken seriously.
Which was better?
I liked Cata's first tier. Unfortunately after that it started to go downhill. Way too much recycled content. Firelands was a terrible raid. I quit around this time so never did DS but popular opinion seems to be that DS was a fail raid. When two of your three raid tiers suck, you've most likely got a terrible expansion.
I personally had fun in Cataclysm. I leveled the remainder of classes I had not played. However, I did not enjoy the end game raiding content. It seemed mediocre, and more as if blizzard was taking the time to develop something on a larger scale for the future, which I have failed to see as of yet.