I have nobody else to say this to, but I want to say it anyways: WoW is still good...

[Reaper0329]

I think Battle for Azeroth is a steaming hot pile of shit in the otherwise good punch bowl, but WoW's still WoW...I don't have time or drive to play like I used to, but I'm still here, bitching about it even as I log on.

I hope the next expansion is everything this one isn't, however.

[Jessicka]

"...the 99% caught up..."

Indeed.

They never caught up, they left. What's left are those who were a permanent fixture anyway, with ever rising expectations of each other to stay ahead of the curve. And ever more disappointment with those who do not.

[Hittion]

Indeed.

They never caught up, they left. What's left are those who were a permanent fixture anyway, with ever rising expectations of each other to stay ahead of the curve. And ever more disappointment with those who do not.

I never really understood the need to catch up... no game that I know of promises you that you get to beat it. Mario doesn't say you will rescue the princess only that you can.

I never understood how in wow it became the expectation that the game just let you win. Was being in ssc/tk really that terrible when others had bt and kara?

[Lodreh]

WoW is not a bad game... and it can be fixed with the right patch. For me the problem comes with the grinding/ RNG nature of WoW right now. I do not like grinding. I'll do the content to see the story and move on... I do not want to spend days/weeks doing the same thing over and over again just to fill a little bar 75 points out of 21000. That is not fun. Second is the proliferation of RNG. Currency gear on par with high end dungeon/raid gear has been a staple and within reach since TBC. That's where I first recall seeing badge gear. I also seem to recall getting close to full BiS before IoQ opened. I did not play every day... I knocked out a few dungeon runs on the weekends and was able to progress. Now if I don't log in all week I see virtually no progress on the weekend. Not fun.

In contrast I've been playing Final Fantasy XIV lately. First thing I noticed is the story is great and doesn't make you feel like poo because your leader is doing shady shit. Dungeon runs are fun and drops seem to be plentiful. If you get a BoP you can't use you can either convert it to currency or hold it to switch to later. (WoW equivalent would be Need before Greed but BoP becomes BoA since you can play every class on one character in FF). There are some RNG elements and you may not get the drop you had hoped for but there is no daily or weekly lockout... run it again if you want. Over all I have not had a feeling of grinding in FF... even when leveling up secondary jobs... mainly due to each job having it's own story, the playtime feels more engaging.

[Jessicka]

I never really understood the need to catch up... no game that I know of promises you that you get to beat it. Mario doesn't say you will rescue the princess only that you can.

I never understood how in wow it became the expectation that the game just let you win. Was being in ssc/tk really that terrible when others had bt and kara?

There's a lot to do in WoW, 'catching up' allows you to do those things. Read my longer post on the page before.

It was different in TBC because the population was still growing fast, so there were always people at your level, by Cataclysm certainly, the population had kind of stagnated, and the reset with the new expansion put everyone on the same page; and on the same page they stayed. It's not really a matter of 'catching up' in that respect anymore.

I know for a fact if I log on tonight, which I may well do, there won't be many players on the first tier of raids/dungeons, which is the level I left it at. Like I said in my last page, with Azerite Power, and no one to play with at my level, there's literally no prospect of catching up to play with anyone else. So I don't play.

[Unholyground]

Getting gear all the damn time that is a tiny upgrade doesn't feel good period, and knowing it will be replaced a lot quicker than previous iterations of the game is disheartening, they desensitized us to loot drops which is a foundation of the game play reward loop inherent in this type of game.

Reducing the amount of sources gear drop from and making them more desirable is they key to bringing the game back to feeling more rewarding but it won't happen.

[Super Kami Dende]

WoW is still Good. It's just not currently the game I feel is worth my time atm.

[Malix Farwin]

People have no idea what they want and whine about, 90% of the time they contradict themselves (especially the Classic fanboys). That's not to say BfA is good, it really isn't, but it's still the best MMORPG on the market at the moment - believe me, I've played ALL others.

Let's hope we get a good 9.0.

Better class design, ML back, no titan forging, raid gear to be relevant again, ect.

[EternalBany]

Retail is NOT an RPG, and for the people that only do LFR it is not even online as everyone else might as well just be bots
so where do we get the MMORPG from anymore?

[Jessicka]

There's a difference between catch up and letting you win. If catch up doesn't exist, there's no obvious avenue for new and returning players to get back to playing with the mass of players on the current tier.

The problem for a player like me, is that there are about a dozen avenues, and you have to do all of them. It's completely overwhelming to want to be bothered with. This is why people who fall behind end up abandoning the expansion altogether and coming back at the start of the next.

In much simpler times, your guild mates would boost you with alts. Now you have to grind through multiple tiers of dungeons, dailies, islands, multiple tiers of raiding, questlines, achievements and fuck knows what else.

[styil]

Is this thread a repost from 2009?

[Hittion]

There's a difference between catch up and letting you win. If catch up doesn't exist, there's no obvious avenue for new and returning players to get back to playing with the mass of players on the current tier.

There is the path every other player took before them...

[Cockus Maximus]

I've been playing WoW since the very beginning of TBC and had loads of fun in the Classic stress test this weekend. I think that over the years the game has certainly improved in a lot of aspects, but ruined the game in other ways. Unfortunately, most people can't articulate exactly what went wrong but they do 'FEEL' that something is missing.

Personally, I think that raiding, PvP, and class design have improved significantly since Vanilla WoW. On the other side of that coin, gearing nowadays is clearly designed for maximum laziness on the part of the development team. LFG needs to be unavailable at least until max level. This whole phasing/layering and cross realm thing in addition to LFG is what really turned WoW into a single player game. To sum it up, a lot of the QoL changes were nice especially when it comes to class design, but the community aspect was a big part of WoW and they ruined that completely. Also professions need to be useful again.

EDIT: oh and if CC was useful in dungeons again that would be a big step towards turning WoW back into a quality MMORPG instead of the single player hack n' slash ARPG it is now.

[Varitok]

People have no idea what they want and whine about, 90% of the time they contradict themselves (especially the Classic fanboys). That's not to say BfA is good, it really isn't, but it's still the best MMORPG on the market at the moment - believe me, I've played ALL others.

Let's hope we get a good 9.0.

Tip #1. Never believe someone who says Believe Me

[scubi666stacy]

Well, in retail we have today this daily login thing, where you miss out on rewards or progress if you don't play every day, but only now and then. But honestly, we had the same thing in Classic, only for different reasons. When I got to 60 on my first character, I found myself a group to run Scholomance with, to farm some items. It was raid preparation for them, which at that time was not in my mind whatsoever, because I only had a bad PC. And after some time, these people moved on to raiding MC, and I was left behind. People shold stop pretending that Vanilla was RPG and MMO heaven. It surely was not. One of the reasons why I will be playing a shaman this time... because I can be a healer - so I can get into groups easily when I want to run a dungeon. I know that my chances would also be quite OK if I would play my favorite class (Mage), but still...

[Raelbo]

I never really understood the need to catch up...

Because it's a 15 year old game which is best played with other people.

If you fall behind, for whatever reason, playing with other people becomes impractical without a catchup mechanism. Honestly, I struggle to understand how anyone doesn't get this very basic concept.

no game that I know of promises you that you get to beat it. Mario doesn't say you will rescue the princess only that you can.

I never understood how in wow it became the expectation that the game just let you win.

Just because WoW has catchup mechanisms doesn't mean that "it promises you that you get to beat it" or that "the game just let you win". You're strawmanning (because your argument, as usual, is nonsense).

Catching up is not, by any stretch of the imagination, "beating the game". It's putting you at a baseline where you're able to participate in current content. You "beat" the game by achieving Cutting Edge, or making Gladiator, and 95%+ of the playerbase does not achieve this.

Was being in ssc/tk really that terrible when others had bt and kara?

Not at first. Which is why TBC worked.

It's not that being in different tiers itself is bad. It's that getting stuck, and never getting to the later tiers is. It's that the game moves on, new content gets added and most of the playerbase is failing to progress because the system (which includes guilds and players and recruitment strategies) was set up this way.

When content is released, people want to be part of it, not sitting on the sidelines doing stuff that has been out for 2 years (or 15 years).

The game might not force you to progress tier by tier anymore, but in practice it achieves that progression better than it ever has in the past, because everyone gets to actually participate in each tier, provided they're around and willing to actually bother with it. If you decide to "skip" a tier, yes, you miss out on it and don't get to go back and experience it in the same way as part of your progression, but you'd be kidding yourself if you wanted to pretend that this is somehow any different from how it played out in TBC for the vast majority of players. Secondly, people who skip tiers have only themselves to blame if they've missed out.

But who am I kidding. I've personally explained this to you repeatedly. It's like you don't want to listen so that you can carry on repeating your tired, silly narrative ad nauseum.

[Ulfric Trumpcloak]

I disagree.

[lockybalboa]

You really gotta give credit to Ion for being capable of turning such a outstanding franchise to a steam pile of ****

[Tradu]

All that WoW needs is a basic slow down, and the 99% wont even understand what they are crying about, they think that item they finally got 4 months late has any value instead of getting it the 3rd week and then complaining.

All this doom and gloom started because the 99% caught up, return the game to where the 99% was busy wiping at daily HC dungeons and daily quests and somehow thats good "for the game".

In reality , people cant accept that the changes were made for them and they think somehow things were better when they had to farm the same dungeons, 10 months into the expansion, with 50 item levels higher for currency points, because they get to type "Hi" to some random people that couldnt care less and just need to get done with the shitty dungeon for the 50th time.

Make that literally the entire expansion and you have M+ and how it fucked up gearing.

[McNeil]

I still like WoW, I just don't like BFA. We have seen much better days (TBC, WotLK) but we have also seen worse (Cata, WoD). Classic is also WoW which should be a fun experience in a few weeks.