Preach drops some unexpected and well-articulated truth bombs

[thilicen]

If Preach had his way there would be no leveling, quests, story, pvp, outdoor content, nothing. Only raids.

[ercarp]

If Preach had his way there would be no leveling, wuests, story, nothing. Only raids.

Yeah, pretty much. I'm not on the same frequency with him at all.

[Micronetic]

The dev team, Ion in particular, would be well-served to pull their heads out of their arses and listen to what Preach said.

Too long didn't watch

Why should they watch/listen to him if even you could not watch it because it is too long?

[barrsftw]

Just a couple of comments:

1. Thread will stay open for a while since there's enough of a summary to have some discussion.

2. This forum has a sticky for videos. Use it. If you want to comment on anything that Preach, Asmongold or anyone else has said, write a summary and post it for discussion. This site isn't necessarily interested in promoting YouTube channels other than its own.

3. Starting a thread about how developers should learn something from a video that the OP didn't bother to watch since it was too long isn't very inspiring.

Nobody wants to use it. It's and extremely old fashioned and unintuitive way to view content. Who want's to sift through a sticky to be able to watch new videos on this forum? Not to mention every post will be almost immediately glossed over, and if it isn't then there's just going to be multiple discussions on in the same thread.

Unless the only purpose of the thread is to indirectly "ban" self-promo videos, in which case it makes sense I guess.

[Erwarth]

No he doesn't.

[Spazlord]

But it mostly is the reason they came back.

Vanilla is clunky and sucks in almost every possible way. Classes are broken, the world is long and drawn out with no purpose, quests have no flow and almost no actual coherent story running through them, dungeons are shoved full with a thousand mobs, which aren't difficult because you can still pull them one at a time, it just takes fucking forever.

The worst possible choice they could make is to make the game more like Vanilla. The people who love Vanilla want VANILLA, not live with a few vanilla tweaks. Because there's no possible way they will ever turn the game back to Vanilla, even mechanically. The people who love that clunky ass awful game are going to stick with the thing they like.

Frankly the simplest thing they need to do is stop adding in more and more MAU features. Stop the endless grinds and just go back to making the only grind the gear grind, not a weapon or necklace that you need to incessantly get an infinite resource for to keep competitive in end game pve. And even if they did that, to credit it to Classic would be a huge stretch, at best. Because plenty of the expansions (In fact all of them before WoD) didn't have those features.

Also this idea that BfA is busy is ridiculous. Sure maybe there's a lot to do if you decide you're going to mythic raid, do mythic dungeons, do high end arena, do the hardest pet battles, and constantly run for transmogs.

The amount of people who do all of those at once is almost zero.

You’re wrong.

Classic has a great questing experience with long chains of linked quests at every level and a whole string of epic/elite/dungeon/raid quest chains at max level. Much more so than newer expansions and their hubs of 3-5 quests and maybe 1 chain quest for the whole expansion.

Classic is very casual in its play style. Log on for a bit, chip away at something. Come back a few days later, do a bit more. Do the raid, once. Run some dungeons as you like. Farm some mats maybe.

There’s no chores, no x amount of rep to grind each day, no more (gated), no less (don’t miss your quota for the day). You don’t have to do a +10 (mythic chest), conquest PvP cap, 4 islands, weekly quest (4 mythic, 4 TW, 4 BG wins, etc) plus your raid, maybe on more than 1 difficulty if you’re prog. on mythic with heroic farms for trinkets. New WoW is all busy work and if you don’t keep it up for at least the first month or two of a new tier you get significantly behind the gear curve as you miss out on high ilvl chests and AP for your neck or whatever.

I prefer the old way.

[BeepBoo]

Nobody wants to use it.

I wasn't even aware it existed, and I'm definitely not going to start using it now... dumb policy is dumb. Someone starting a discussion about a vid on your forum isn't your forum fucking promoting it.

On topic! This video belongs in that "blizzard shouldn't balance around mythic raiding" thread. The bit about "the reason we're seeing less and less complaining as a proportion of the feedback is because most of the people who were upset have left; not because blizzard actually fixed the problem" is probably the most important part.

The game eroded it's actual player base down to a small contingent of hardcore elitists and chinese mobile gamers who care more about cosmetics and randomly getting a 1 point shiny upgrade for killing that murloc for the 120978023th time.

Sure, maybe the mobile market players are the lion's share of the pie now, but only because blizz fucked the game up enough to make that happen.

[Nasuuna]

his rant on the gearing system made my head spin in the same way my head was spinning when I deactivated my account 2 months ago

[Speedlance]

People play to much, impossible to create a game that is flawlessly fun forever.

[Cosmic Janitor]

Unless the only purpose of the thread is to indirectly "ban" self-promo videos, in which case it makes sense I guess.

I mean stopping soulsoneedy from advertising his youtube channel is one thing, but removing the citation to the source seems a bit excessive, though personally I really hate the video emedding tag, just a link should be fine.

[Yoshingo]

Classic has a great questing experience with long chains of linked quests at every level and a whole string of epic/elite/dungeon/raid quest chains at max level

You do realize that quests that are just linked together is not the same thing as an actual cohesive storyline, right? Because there's not a super epic tale to be told when Westfall has 5 quests that are just, 'Go kill the new kind of defias' or jumbled messes of zones like thousand needles or desolace or feralas where almost none of the quests have anything to do with each other, and are mostly populated by, 'Kill 25 mobs.'

Much more so than newer expansions and their hubs of 3-5 quests and maybe 1 chain quest for the whole expansion.

The idea that anybody could honestly say, with a straight face, that the quests in live aren't more story orientated compared to Vanilla is just farcical. You can hate the story if you want but to try and honestly say that the quests are not more integrated into the story is just a lie.

Classic is very casual in its play style. Log on for a bit, chip away at something. Come back a few days later, do a bit more. Do the raid, once. Run some dungeons as you like. Farm some mats maybe.

Yeah and then in 2 years when you hit level 60 you can get to Outland and do it all over again.

You don’t have to do a +10 (mythic chest), conquest PvP cap, 4 islands, weekly quest (4 mythic, 4 TW, 4 BG wins, etc) plus your raid, maybe on more than 1 difficulty if you’re prog. on mythic with heroic farms for trinkets.

Yeah and what percentage of players are doing all of these things at the same time. Is it even 1%? Are you? Its like the people complaining during the end of mop that they felt the need to do the maximum number of dailies each day which helped directly lead to our MAU state the live game has. Yeah no fucking shit, if you're doing the absolute hardest content in the game, you should probably expect to do more than billy bob who logs on an hour a week to continue leveling in Kun-Lai.

Congratulations to the whining mythic players, your complaints in Mists of Pandaria helped shape the thing you're now bitching about in BfA.

Live complainers always seems to compare the hardest of the hardcore player of live compared to random joe schmoe on classic who plays an hour a week. If you wanted to hardcore raid in Vanilla you were constantly running the same dungeons over and over again because your necklace or trinket or offhand just wouldn't drop for you. And it was, objectively, the best piece of gear that you had to have to be successful. You had people grinding reputation forever just to get an extra bit of shadow resistance for naxxramas or nature for ahn'qiraj. Or fishing up stonescale eel for hours and hours on end for tank flasks.

Nobody is arguing that being the .1% of the playerbase who does the maximum difficulty content the second it releases does a lot. That's kind of the point. And why they get the very best rewards in the game. Just like was true of Vanilla when people were raiding Naxxramas. You're still doing busy work in both cases.

[BeepBoo]

his rant on the gearing system made my head spin in the same way my head was spinning when I deactivated my account 2 months ago

His rant or his recap of the actual state of the BFA systems? Because hearing him string all of that garbage (TF, ap, traits, essences, benthic gear) together like that made me want to toss my monitor out a window in disgust at blizzard. It's the entire reason I quit.

[Tydan]

And there was me thinking people were moaning like fuck only 3 years ago in WOD cos there was nothing to do

[Sinaa]

You’re wrong.

Classic has a great questing experience with long chains of linked quests at every level and a whole string of epic/elite/dungeon/raid quest chains at max level. Much more so than newer expansions and their hubs of 3-5 quests and maybe 1 chain quest for the whole expansion.

Classic is very casual in its play style. Log on for a bit, chip away at something. Come back a few days later, do a bit more. Do the raid, once. Run some dungeons as you like. Farm some mats maybe.

There’s no chores, no x amount of rep to grind each day, no more (gated), no less (don’t miss your quota for the day). You don’t have to do a +10 (mythic chest), conquest PvP cap, 4 islands, weekly quest (4 mythic, 4 TW, 4 BG wins, etc) plus your raid, maybe on more than 1 difficulty if you’re prog. on mythic with heroic farms for trinkets. New WoW is all busy work and if you don’t keep it up for at least the first month or two of a new tier you get significantly behind the gear curve as you miss out on high ilvl chests and AP for your neck or whatever.

I prefer the old way.

My view of classic is different. Once you are geared in pre raid BIS all you do (at the current stage) is grinding gold so that you can enchant your raiding gear and get those consumables. As the game progresses and gear actually starts to matter in raids this will be even more pronounced for pve players. For slower players it might take up to 6 months to get to the pre raid BIS stage, but it's not something that could keep one busy for years at least not on one character.

[Zatetic]

I agree with this however I'd add that there isn't enough actual content. Once the time gating is lifted, there is realistically a few days of stuff to do each patch before you go back to afking in town. Its artificially inflated by the time gating and shitty resource grinds. realistically there isnt anything introduced other than new systems to slow you down.

[Dracullus]

Preach often make great points, but he's speaking from perspective of raider that don't really care about or even hate rest of the game.

So I would listen him when he talks about classes or boss encounters (althought he never took a break, so 90% of his comments is "it's boring"), but never when he talk about overall game design. We would end up in another WoD.

And I'm serious about that - just check Preach content at this time, he acknowlegded that most people have nothing to do, but he was happy with raid or die. He even repeated this in some recent video, that he likes Classic more cause he can log in for raid without doing all this "bullshit" he have to do in retail.

[Yoshingo]

Isn't it better that the game has 10 things to do that various people like, even if you only enjoy doing 1 or 2 of them?

You don't have to do them all, people know that, right?

[BeepBoo]

And there was me thinking people were moaning like fuck only 3 years ago in WOD cos there was nothing to do

I skipped WOD, but I would have been upset with it because it offered very little for me. I want the juicy content... basically exclusively at this point. That means lots of raids and lots of dungeons. WOD had too few of both, with too long a gap between.

Conversely, while BFA has oh so much to do... it's all garbage tier bottom barrel, easiest to design and make content that they attempt to coerce you into needing to do it if you want to be the best at the content you actually care about.

I don't WANT reasons to go do islands. Islands are boring as shit. I don't WANT reasons to grind mana pearls. Both of the new zones suck ass, and overwolrd content is literal faceroll in terms of difficulty.

For something to be content I actually WANT to play, it has to be at least difficult, if not outright hard. Mage tower challenges were on point when they first dropped (before ilvl inflation trivialized them near the end of the xpac). High m+ keys are on point. Raids are always on point. New long 5 man dungeons, a'la kara and mecha, are on point. What is not on point is most of the garbage "content" they try to feed me.

So yeah, I'll go on being simultaneously upset that wod had not-enough and bfa has too much, because bfa has too much of the wrong crap.

You don't have to do them all, people know that, right?

You do if your prime motivation in the game is epeen stroking on meters, which is my goal. If you didn't actually have to do them to be the best, and instead activities were segregated like resilience gear and pve set bonuses back in bc & wrath, then hell yeah. I'd be fine with all this different content existing. But while blizz holds my performance hostage behind doing all this crap I absolutely refuse to do, I'm gonna be pissed.

[turboether]

Too many things to do? Too many systems?

Remember when they condensed all the systems into one system, and removed all meaningful rewards from optional systems that weren't raiding?

Yeah, it was called Warlords of Draenor.

[Wildpantz]

Seems like another generic "vanilla was better" click-bait rant from a YouTuber to me.

BfA isn't actually that "busy" when you actually play it. It might seem that way if you've never played it and the breadth of things to do hits you, but if you actually did play it, much of that became relevant at different times, and only had a limited time of relevance or eventually you just were "done".

If you kept up with activities, you can perfectly fine raid-log right now, or raid and do 1-2 M+ a week to for the chest, with nothing really "lost" to you.

The majority of people complaining about "too much to do" are generally doing it to themselves, farming unreasonable things for 0.1% of improvements. Play at 99%, which is still plenty to tackle all possible content, and you'll spend so much less time doing it, and enjoy the game so much more in the process.

I imagine for most people with such complaints, they took a break before, they come back, they have no guild or friends to support them, making everything worse. WoW is a social game, even if classic people will try to tell you that you need to play classic to experience that, but a good guild and/or group of friends will do a lot of good for experiencing WoW even on retail.

If you only play 1 spec sure bfa is great. If youre a tank player a real one you have have all tanks geard and ready to go and its a pain atm with essences super boring to time gate shit behind reps etc