Why was World of Warcraft dumbed down that much?

[Whidbey]

That's why I'm playing on a private server. Playing for free while meeting people who greet you/are social in dungeons/bg's is much better than the atrocity that is anti-social retail WoW.

If you play on a P.S. you are not playing the real game, just some poorly put together broken emulation.

[Deleted]

That's why I'm playing on a private server. Playing for free while meeting people who greet you/are social in dungeons/bg's is much better than the atrocity that is anti-social retail WoW.

But private server comes with lagg and a LOT of bugs + bad scripted things, :/

[KCguy]

It's called changing things up to make things better. I don't want a BC type model year after year. It worked back then because everyone was new at the game and had no idea what the hell to do, so they were fine with the leveling grind, only doing dungeons, not raiding and only doing PvP.

Why do you think Blizzard began to change raiding when Wrath hit? Because WoW is and will always be a PvE game first and they wanted people to actually do the raids that they spent thousands upon thousands of hours creating.

I still shake my head at how many people hate LFR. If you do normal raiding, then why do you care? Some people will argue against it until they're blue in the face, and for what? You shouldn't care and if you do, no argument you make will honestly make anyone side with you if you have the option and do normal raiding.

[Hb]

More bets? I'll set this one at Heroic Jin'rokh.

Sorry heroic raiding is so damn easy that I quit it in Cata. I know its the same because I will just ask my old guild mates about the difficulty and they will always say its the same.

Try to wake up for a sec and realize the game is so faceroll

[zeekphreak]

Here's the thing. One of the reasons for Warcraft's massive success in Classic and BC was due to the fact that it was significantly easier, more forgiving, and more accessible than all of the other popular MMOs on the market. Anyone who played at the time and had experience with other MMOs like Everquest could tell you this.

That is why it has continued to simplify itself- because it worked, and because it was always Blizzard's design philosophy, from the very beginning. Whether this simplification is or is not one of the causes of the sub loss, or whether that is better attributed to the game's age, possibly outdated sub-to-play model, or the general popularity of MMOs right now, is all and only unproven and unprovable speculation.

+1

nail on head. give this man his internets

I did want to pose a question however. I may even make a thread about it. Is World of Warcraft, as big as it is. Too big for a Free to Play model? Ignoring the massive number of subscribers for the time being. With all the content, items, mounts, pets ect the game has to offer. Could it simply be too large to convert to a cash shop model?

[OzoAndIndi]

Dumbed down or just chewed all the flavor out of it like a piece of old Wrigley's Juicy Fruit?

[xanzul]

That's why I'm playing on a private server. Playing for free while meeting people who greet you/are social in dungeons/bg's is much better than the atrocity that is anti-social retail WoW.

Ever think to consider people are "anti social" in Wow because of people like you and the OP? Mods lock this thread it is going to be nothing but arrogant condescending insults. There is absolutely nothing constructive that is going to come from the premise this thread was started on.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:32 PM ----------

if you want a game where everything is as inconvenient as possible while pretending that it's challenging then you need to go back about 15 years and play eq1

an extremely small percentage of players got to clear raids back then so it's exactly what you're looking for

Screw raiding. A small percentage of raiders were able to lvl solo. EVERYTHING in EQ required a group and even then you had to grind for hours and hours and hours to get anything done.

[SamR]

Looks like the OP is on an anti-LFR posting spree. Here's another recent thread he made about LFR and got infracted for:

http://www.mmo-champion.com/threads/...ion-of-society

Note: Off-topic. Knock it off. [ML]

[xanzul]

One simple answer:

"Meeting market expectations."

The gaming market went from being dominated by a hardcore NES generation to a market where the majority of the customers are average housewives and men who barely know how to install a program on their PC.

Hardcode NES generation? What the fuck? Are you kidding me? Jesus christ. No. Just no. I grew up with Atari and NES and there was nothing hardcore about gaming back then it was just crude and for the most part broken. That doesn't make it better that just makes it old. As much as I loved many games from back then I love many current games even more now. Stop with this nonsense.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:38 PM ----------

I find it hilarious that whenever a topic like this pops up someone or multiple people will bring up <insert boss kill>.

I'm sorry but you don't get to call the game dumbed down and simple without the experience to back it up. If the game is so "simple" and "dumbed down" then boss kills should be of no consequence to get right? Right? Oh right. Most people who make these claims are talking out of their ass.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:42 PM ----------

Money. 10chars

Of course it is about money. If Blizzard hadn't changed Wow with the times and the industry it would have been dead in the water years ago without ever breaking 5 million subs much less 12.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:46 PM ----------

You know, I do miss dungeons like BRDs. They actually felt like real places and not just some decorated corridor.

What it needed was better "signalling" to orientate the players and maps (even 3D maps; Why not? WoW is a 3D game!).

So it is only a dungeon if you get lost for hours before ever finding the bosses or mobs you need for your quests?

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:49 PM ----------

ad hominem. just ignore these people.

Questioning your experience in this "dumbed down" and "simple" game in a thread YOU yourself created is an ad hominem? Seriously why is this thread still open?

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:55 PM ----------

While I agree with your first paragraph, the second paragraph is something I very much disagree with. During Vanilla and TBC, I did not see any simplification going on. If anything TBC was more hardcore than Vanilla. However it was WOTLK (curiously enough, when Activision/Vivendi got involved) when WoW suddenly went SUPER casual. It wasn't even a smooth transition. Literally in one day, all heroics were total faceroll, the main raid of the tier was hilariously easy AND a rehash of previous content. A lot of people praise Ulduar for being the best raid tier ever designed. While I personally wasn't a fan, there were objectively brilliant things about it - namely how the hardmode stuff worked, and the sheer size of it. But it's important to remember that they had sooooo much time to work on that, thanks to using Naxx as the first tier. Clever really.

Once Ulduar was done, the ToC patch - that is when everything went downhill. When the LFD tool came out. Total throwaway raid. Daily quest hubs... pathetically easy dungeons... and total casualisation. Gearscore addon didn't help matters. ICC was a decent raid, marred by increasing nerfs (or rather, player buffs) that eventually over-casualised it.

Cata launch was a pretty decent attempt to fix this (imo anyway), but it was too late. Too late to go back from how casual ICC was, and there was a huge backlash... Blizzard caved, and that was when I knew we would never get the good ol' WoW back.

This is why we bring up nostalgia because it blinds people to what really actually happened back then. You are living proof of it.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:58 PM ----------

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

Get out. Just go.

[OzoAndIndi]

...dominated by a hardcore NES generation to a market where the majority of the customers are average housewives and men who barely know how to install a program on their PC.

Eh personally I think that's a bit off, at least in part... Doubt people who know so little could even find their way onto it. Plus, many "average housewives" these day were part of the generation who grew up with NES and the start of computers taught in school.

I don't mean to point fingers, but I have long suspected that it's simply partly due to the natural addition of a younger group of players who previously were not there, who are now old enough to discover the game and may be a large chunk of a new player base. Who...well, to be honest, are part of what seems to be a very instant gratification minded group. And rather "me" focused. (Not saying all of them are of course, so no offense intended to those who are not, but it's pretty rampant.) Dumbing it down does kind of coordinate with people who have little patience for not getting something now and sooner/easier.

[xanzul]

to reach a larger age group = more money.
It is why i quit.

People of all ages have been playing Wow since day one. In one of my very first raid guilds during vanilla we had a 75 year old woman who played a hunter and an 11 year old resto shaman and a 13 year old rogue on our raid team. Nothing Blizzard has done has changed that one iota.

[Deleted]

Lots of overly defensive people ITT.

You can be a fan of WoW and admit it's gotten steamlined and dumbed down to a degree. It's just the direction gaming has gone as it's gone mainstream.

I'm sure everyone has seen this little joke:

[IMG]map.jpg[IMG]

Games are now for "everyone" and eveyrone includes 5 year olds who can't read and 85 year olds who have never booted up a PC.

Game developers want to cast as wide a net as possible and that means often the quality of the game is compromised as to not "scare off" too many buffons.

It's not an attack on WoW, it's just the sad state of the industry.

That state of the industry has been a trend, yes, but the industry that actually follows these kinds of games isn't exactly all of the gaming industry. It is the FPS market, which is, frankly, huge. WoW might be affected by this, sure, but for different reasons.

See, in FPS games, you get that sort of map because the devs need small environments to work with their scripted events, with what limited AI they have and to get better visuals and somewhat okay-ish physics out of hardware that, by now, is more than half a decade old (yes, I'm talking about consoles). This is Call of Duty's doing, not something that can (or should) be applied to the gaming industry as a whole just because 5-mans in WoW have become less of a maze due to entirely different reasons.

In fact, I could point at games like Red Dead Redemption, various GTA titles, open world racing games or, dunno, Skyrim and the like, that all get bigger and bigger witl (almost) every iteration. That is, however, not quite the same thing that's happening to WoW. Dungeons aren't something you can just leave half-way through - you'd just leave four other players behind like that, which is not cool. With most games that actually get bigger and bigger, you can quick-save and turn your game off whenever. And that's the difference: You need short dungeons that can be done in 30 minutes or whatever because, frankly, the target audience of WoW isn't the kind of player any more that doesn't answer the phone or the door for the next three hours because someone wants to clear Blackrock Depths. That, by the way, is more due to the game being focused at young(ish) adults who have jobs, friends and a family. Because those are the commitments that the core audience has made, Blizzard has to ensure that the game fits in-between those things.

That's far from catering to kids. If the game was focused on kids, they could've continued to create dungeons that take a few hours to clear. Because some 15-year-old actually has that much spare time to play a video game without any interruption. Most adults I know can't really do that - unless on weekends, maybe. A weekend-only game isn't what a lot of folks would pay for, I reckon, at least not with enough alternatives floating around.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:05 PM ----------

"Quality of life" improvements can destroy a game.

Let's say hypothetically Blizzard put in a feature where you could instantly warp anywhere in the world whenever you wanted.

Would it be a quality of life improvement? Sure would, I mean, travel time is just filler after all, nobody plays the game to travel, however would such a feature destroy the game? Sure would.

You keep removing "filler" and streamlining stuff and simplifying, eventually you've fundamentally changed the game.

First off, yes, some people play the game to travel. Exploration is a big factor in games for a certain type of player, it is what drives them. Second, I'd have to ask why it'd destroy the game. Honestly now, would it? I mean, you wouldn't have to use it, obviously. Unless you felt compelled to use it because everyone else does and you're afraid to fall behind or be at a disadvantage, then. But then, the problem would be on your end - and that is that you care more about what other people get out of the game and what you get in comparison. Sure, it's a multi-player game, but that doesn't mean it's a "I have to compare to others and be unhappy unless we're all playing by my rules to I can feel good about myself again"-game.

[Orangetai420]

Here's the thing. One of the reasons for Warcraft's massive success in Classic and BC was due to the fact that it was significantly easier, more forgiving, and more accessible than all of the other popular MMOs on the market. Anyone who played at the time and had experience with other MMOs like Everquest could tell you this.

That is why it has continued to simplify itself- because it worked, and because it was always Blizzard's design philosophy, from the very beginning. Whether this simplification is or is not one of the causes of the sub loss, or whether that is better attributed to the game's age, possibly outdated sub-to-play model, or the general popularity of MMOs right now, is all and only unproven and unprovable speculation.

How was BC easier? Sunwell and BT was crazy hard without class stacking...

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 05:24 PM ----------

Lots of overly defensive people ITT.

You can be a fan of WoW and admit it's gotten steamlined and dumbed down to a degree. It's just the direction gaming has gone as it's gone mainstream.

I'm sure everyone has seen this little joke:



Games are now for "everyone" and eveyrone includes 5 year olds who can't read and 85 year olds who have never booted up a PC.

Game developers want to cast as wide a net as possible and that means often the quality of the game is compromised as to not "scare off" too many buffons.

It's not an attack on WoW, it's just the sad state of the industry.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 04:05 PM ----------

"Quality of life" improvements can destroy a game.

Let's say hypothetically Blizzard put in a feature where you could instantly warp anywhere in the world whenever you wanted.

Would it be a quality of life improvement? Sure would, I mean, travel time is just filler after all, nobody plays the game to travel, however would such a feature destroy the game? Sure would.

You keep removing "filler" and streamlining stuff and simplifying, eventually you've fundamentally changed the game.

not true, im glad you speak for the entire population >_>

[Durandro]

Sorry heroic raiding is so damn easy that I quit it in Cata. I know its the same because I will just ask my old guild mates about the difficulty and they will always say its the same.

Try to wake up for a sec and realize the game is so faceroll

...no.

And good defense, claiming you quit because its too easy. Good excuse for not providing evidence that you can do these raids easily, isn't it? Its like me saying I could run the London Marathon in two hours without breaking a sweat, but I don't like travelling so I don't need to prove it. Transparent as anything.

Ask a cutting edge heroic raider. They'll tell you things are either as hard as they've always been, or are progressively getting harder. Never 'faceroll' or 'easy'.

[SamR]

How was BC easier? Sunwell and BT was crazy hard without class stacking...

I think he meant easier than EQ and other contemporary MMOs.

And BT(and Mt. Hyjal) was the second easiest full tier ever put in the game after Wrath Naxx(not counting Kara). If it weren't for all the attunement gating, a lot more people would have steamrolled that place. I loved the raid and a lot of the bosses in BT, but crazy hard it certainly was not.

[Archangel Tyrael]

Good lord, the amount of blizzard fanboys and how they defend this game is grotesque.

Note: Don't derail threads with off-topic comments. [ML]

[Zenny]

A need for class trainers is gone, because now one is magically gifted by a powerful God of some sort with new abilities.

Cause asking a trainer to lear ability x/y/z added so much depth? Better let several D&D RPG's know that they are full of shit.

There's no more joy of eagerly awaiting that spell you see in the list several levels ahead.

I still find it quite satisfying to learn a new spell. On my new Warlock, getting Chaos Bolt was pretty impressive.

The mobs are pathetic, and the classes are overpowered in PvE. A low level character could easily take on 5 or 6 mobs before seeing any sign of difficulty in fighting them. What ever happened to having to be careful, actually working to complete a quest or dungeon? You simply AOE them down now.

Depends on the class really, Tanks usually have a far easier time in doing this compared to say melee DPS. Overall it has become easier yes, for good reason however. Dungeons and Quests are not usually "PVE end-game".

However the recent Warlock class quest does turn this on its head. It's pretty brutal.

Spell tooltips showing you when to use your spells, how to use them and in what kind of scenario.

Oh noes! Good game design, how horrible.

Talent trees. Seriously, what is this? I feel like I am in a game for 6 year olds when I look at this. Could they have dumbed it down anymore? I feel like the next step is merely choosing what spec you want, and I expect that change to happen in a few months time.

I suppose choosing 1%/2%/3% crit rate was so hard amiright? The new talent tress are hardly perfect but I find myself changing talents quite often - something I almost never did before.

Dungeons. Why must they show us where each and ever boss is? Heck, even the introduction to instance maps annoyed me a bit. Part of the fun of dungeons was running it a few times before coming across a boss you hadn't seen before, because it's off to the side and new players wouldn't normally know of it. Now we have "Go here for this boss, and this one, and this one, and this one. And don't worry, they're incredibly easy. In a few levels you could probably solo it."

Run the same dungeon several times and you have already memorized the entire thing. Also Dungeons are no longer "end-game" PVE. Merely another quick gearing up tool.

Raids. The LFR is a great example of this, instant gratification with absolutely no commitment required. No preparation required, no need to know what the bosses do, no nothing. Just go in, spam 3-4 buttons and you're done.

This is true, LFR is pretty damn easy. HC modes are most definitely not.

Blizzard is trying to make the game appeal to a younger audience to get the new generation interested in the game. And that's a completely fair goal. However, doing it how they are isn't the right way to go about it. They're making this game boring and disappointing to those of a mediocre intelligence level, and underestimating those of the new generation. They're more intelligent than many will give them credit for, and they do not need this level of simplification of it.

Blizzard are appealing to the same audience they have always tried to appeal to.

In the end they are losing the quality players. The ones that can make it an amazing community, the ones who do not need their parents money to afford the game. The ones who I love to find in a guild and spend hours and hours playing with.

I want a challenge, I want to have to think, I want that excitement back. Because soon i'll feel like i'm playing Farmville, with dragons.

You want a challenge? Kill HC bosses, beat Challenge mode times, get top rank in PVP.

The game today feels as though every cheat possible has been turned on. Warriors and Warlocks are vastly different to the one I rolled all those years ago.

This is a good thing, you want to feel powerful yet still have challenges that you need to overcome. Also class evolution is important, the modern Warrior/Warlock is miles better then the class designs that have come before.

---------- Post added 2013-06-24 at 11:38 PM ----------

Good lord, the amount of blizzard fanboys and how they defend this game is grotesque.

I'm not a raging "fanboy". I freely admit Blizzard can make huge cockups, for example current Mage design sucks. They are also loath to outright admit when they have made a specific design mistake. Also, come to think of it they could really do with some better plot/story development, they seem to get the general direction down but stumble on specifics.

However the points raised by the OP are not valid design criticisms. Neither is your post for that matter.

[Tharkkun]

Good lord, the amount of blizzard fanboys and how they defend this game is grotesque.

Good Lord. The animosity shown towards players who continue to enjoy playing a game you do not.

Note: You too. Stay on-topic and don't derail threads. [ML]

[Deleted]

I don't know if the term 'dumbed down' is correct. However, I feel vanilla appealed to people who enjoyed to just be dropped in a huge world, get lost it in it and find your own path and way. Now the game holds your hand all the way through, I think that kind of distances you from your character. Here's your rotation, here's your gear, here's your spells. It's all on auto-mode. People log in as little time as they can to do nothing else but improve their iLevel. I don't get it... that's not the spirit of MMOs (to me, and I know it's subjective).

Yes, 'quality of life' improvements and what not were good but for me personally (and this is a matter of personal opinion) they have taken it way too far. I loved the slow gearing up process, I loved farming mats for my gear that took ages, getting Lionheart helm crafted and my warrior was such an epic moment. I loved how every epic truly felt epic. I still remember my first epic on all my characters from vanilla and nearly all my gear. I doubt people who leveled in the later expansions can say that (I don't know for sure though).

You can't please everybody, you have the people who enjoy spending lots of time working on progress, getting lost in the world and being part of a community (RP's, "special snowflakes") and you have people who enjoy playing as little as they can for the most rewards they can get ("casual scrubs"). Neither group is "right", but it's quite obvious Blizzard has decided to design for the latter group.

I think we who enjoy a game that's more of a time-sink, harder in difficulty, more punishing etc should give up wow, it's a lost cause to play it for us anymore. Upside is there's a huge community of us, and an untapped market for future MMO designers. I think Blizzard made a huge mistake in giving in to player demands. We want epics, we want to see every raidboss in the game, we want to travel quicker, we want every single thing in the game to be easy/cheap/accessible... Ok, so how does Azeroth feel now? Small, anti-social, instanced, poor community, monotonous characters/gear. Bleh.

[Clockwork Pinkie]

Cause people loved BC so much. So they're following that system, giving away gear as BC did 1 patch after launch.