Unpopular Opinions: WoW Edition

[Ticj]

Heroic and Mythic needs to be the only raiding difficulties.

If LFR has to stay, then at the very least normal needs to be removed. It is an unnecessary step and it causes a lot of problems with item level bloat.



PvP just needs to go back to the way it was in MoP. Bring back conquest gear, and bring back pvp resillience and pvp power. Ever since those have been removed PvP gear has been useless.

[Tyrannica]

WoD was one of the better expansions.

And this is even true when it comes to wow PvP.

But to be fair WoD could have been so much better as a whole, if devs did not cut a ton of content.


My unpopular opinion...might give 2.

1. I loved the Trial of the Crusader raid in wrath, finally an arena with no trash as a raid, i did it with as many characters as possible.

2. I loved all of the cataclysm level zones and portals, my favorite of course beeing Vash'ir, on the other hand i hated the MoP leveling zones.

[SirCowdog]

Why the extremes?

WoW can be sustainable with Raids, M+ and PvP. Sure it is harder to balance classes around everything, but that's just a tradeoff. What they should stop, is making content like Warfronts and Island Expeditions.

The extreme is created by Blizzard by spending too many resources, and revolving the entire game around raiding for too long. You can see the results in the last few expansions: Other areas of the game suffer, both by being underdeveloped, and by Blizzard's lack of practice at doing anything good besides raiding.

So either Blizzard needs to focus on what they're good at(raiding) and make the entire game about that again, or they need to cut raiding and start spending a LOT of time practicing at making other areas of the game decent. They've got the largest MMO dev team on the planet, and probably the largest budget too. And yet somehow they can't manage to juggle everything, even with such advantages.

[Relapses]

Lots of MMOs have raids. What are you talking about?

But I guess I should have completed my thought. Raids are too polarizing, and IMO far too much dev time is spent on them, causing every other aspect of the game to suffer. Either remove raids, or suck it up and make the entire game about ONLY raids.

Pray tell, how many other MMOs are able to garner more than 100,000 concurrent unique viewers for world first raiding? Oh. Right. Zero.

[Pancreatin]

Well you have shit taste then

[Relapses]

The extreme is created by Blizzard by spending too many resources, and revolving the entire game around raiding for too long. You can see the results in the last few expansions: Other areas of the game suffer, both by being underdeveloped, and by Blizzard's lack of practice at doing anything good besides raiding.

So either Blizzard needs to focus on what they're good at(raiding) and make the entire game about that again, or they need to cut raiding and start spending a LOT of time practicing at making other areas of the game decent. They've got the largest MMO dev team on the planet, and probably the largest budget too. And yet somehow they can't manage to juggle everything, even with such advantages.

Are you trying to get somebody to make the obvious observation that WoD already did that and failed? So you can say, "aha, gotcha! So we already know raiding doesn't work, now it's time to go back to the drawing board!"

Because, like, that's a really shitty argument. WoW is many different things for many people but its raiding is unique enough for it to stand on its own merits. For reasons I just mentioned, raiding is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon as it is the one thing which differentiates itself from the competition.

[united]

Anduin and Sylvanas are both great characters.

[Not A Cat]

I liked Legiondaries, I liked that some of them had an impact on your rotation

Except Prydaz, Prydaz was stupid

[SirCowdog]

Pray tell, how many other MMOs are able to garner more than 100,000 concurrent unique viewers for world first raiding? Oh. Right. Zero.

Uhg....that's your metric? The "esports" of world first raiding? The part of the game that less than 1% of the players participate in?

All you're doing is reinforcing my point. Blizzard's over focus on that aspect of the game causes them to fail at other areas, most notably the joke of the open world full of treadmill WQs.

Other instanced content, such as Warfronts and islands, shows how little practice Blizzard has at large scale non-organized raid content. World PVP can be seen as another example of how other areas of the game are being neglected. And M+, one of the few bright spots, is often criticized for being too repetitive.

So as I said: Either blizzard needs to give up and focus entirely on raiding, or they need to cut back on it and actually make real attempts at other forms of content. All of the resources spent on trying to create a esports world first race, and balancing and over-tuning of content that only gets playes by such a small portion of the players, could be better spent elsewhere for a larger percent of players.

/unpopularopinion

[Relapses]

Uhg....that's your metric? The "esports" of world first raiding? The part of the game that less than 1% of the players participate in?

All you're doing is reinforcing my point. Blizzard's over focus on that aspect of the game causes them to fail at other areas, most notably the joke of the open world full of treadmill WQs.

Other instanced content, such as Warfronts and islands, shows how little practice Blizzard has at large scale non-organized raid content. World PVP can be seen as another example of how other areas of the game are being neglected. And M+, one of the few bright spots, is often criticized for being too repetitive.

So as I said: Either blizzard needs to give up and focus entirely on raiding, or they need to cut back on it and actually make real attempts at other forms of content.

/unpopularopinion

You're allowed your unpopular opinion, as I'm allowed my evidence-based appraisal of your opinion: It's silly.

This sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? :^)

[Alexeht]

Gnomes and dwarfs should not be a separate race, they are basically small humans

[Trumpcat]

I hate Canticle of Sacrifice as well as the Grizzly Hills music. I hate bagpipes.

[SirCowdog]

You're allowed your unpopular opinion, as I'm allowed my evidence-based appraisal of your opinion: It's silly.

This sounds vaguely familiar, doesn't it? :^)

Evidence based? You presented nothing that supports your position. All you did was list numbers that prove my point of view: Dev time and resources spent on raiding is only serving a small portiin of players.

The fact that other games don't do engage in attempts to create an esport isn't relevant.

[Sett]

LFR is a good thing.

The zones should be structured for flying right off the bat. Like how BC and WotLK had it.

The Horde lore and mentality for the faction 'war' brings the worst out in the community. And Blizzard feeds it.

[Relapses]

Evidence based? You presented nothing that supports your position. All you did was list numbers that prove my point of view: Dev time and resources spent on raiding is only serving a small portiin of players.

It's a small portion of players whom provide WoW an incredible level of exposure on a fairly frequent interval. Up until recently, Blizzard never directly supported the "Race to World First" and their partnership with Red Bull for Limit and Pieces still had its viewership dwarfed by Method's... who had zero direct support from Blizzard. We're talking hundreds and thousands of unique viewers who tune in for hours at a time. I'm one of the first people to admit that twitch viewership is a terrible support for any argument but in this particular case it's indispitable. The WF race pushes WoW to the forefront of modern gaming discussions for the few weeks it's relevant. To argue Blizzard needs to shitcan one of the single most enduring and unique features so they can make the game more sanitized for the masses is the exact kind of ass backwards thinking that has caused so many issues for the game in the past. Luckily, anybody with common sense understands that Blizzard would never willfully neuter their most unique feature.

You can have your unpopular opinion, dude, but please don't pretend like it's a great idea. It isn't. It'll never happen.

[SirCowdog]

It's a small portion of players whom provide WoW an incredible level of exposure on a fairly frequent interval. Up until recently, Blizzard never directly supported the "Race to World First" and their partnership with Red Bull for Limit and Pieces still had its viewership dwarfed by Method's... who had zero direct support from Blizzard. We're talking hundreds and thousands of unique viewers who tune in for hours at a time. I'm one of the first people to admit that twitch viewership is a terrible support for any argument but in this particular case it's indispitable. The WF race pushes WoW to the forefront of modern gaming discussions for the few weeks it's relevant. To argue Blizzard needs to shitcan one of the single more enduring and unique features so they can make the game more sanitized for the masses is the exact kind of ass backwards thinking that has caused so many issues for the game in the past. Luckily, anybody with common sense understands that Blizzard would never willfully neuter their most unique feature.

You can have your unpopular opinion, dude, but please don't pretend like it's a great idea. It isn't. It'll never happen.

Hundreds of thousands of viewers(who may or may not be actual current subscribers or payers, and may not even be actual people based on stories of ad vids) vs the millions of actual paying players.

That's why the argument is poor and the "evidence" is weak.

And you need to keep in mind my point was to either ditch raiding entirely, or go full tilt on it. The splitting of the focus is what's harmful, and results in watering down of other areas.

[therealstegblob]

There's romance in WoW? :P I'm no fan of Golden's, but WoW has a long history of terribly written couples.

In the game not so much, but in the books there's romance. Golden is a very shlocky romance writer (the Jaina/Kalec stuff in War Crimes was just awful). And then there's her kind of fanfictiony-tier "I HATE U... NO I LOVE U..." Alleria/Turalyon romance (that to be a little fair I think a couple other authors also handled, if memory serves).

I've said this. Even though I hate Arthas as a character, his downfall did lead to interesting events and I think a film revolving around that would've done better with audiences unfamiliar with Warcraft than the convoluted mess of the First War. I suspect they were planning on a trilogy, which was a mistake.

I disagree. I think the First War is the perfect place to start. It's the natural beginning of the story and sets a lot of past and present world building up. We can start with Stormwind, seeing the world Lothar inhabits and why it's important to him. Then the orcs come over. The orcs are convoluted, sure, but they're easy to understand at face value. They're just green monster men even the most uninitiated fantasy viewer has seen before, and no one needs to know more than that (at first). We discover there's more to the orcs than meets the eye (but are not told everything, obviously) and we watch as the orcs destroy Stormwind (LIKE THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO). Orgrim kills Blackhand (LIKE HE'S SUPPOSED TO) and the survivors flee across the sea, setting up a sequel.

Boom. Easy. Just tell the damn story the way they wrote it. It works really, really well. You can do the first and second wars as a film, hit Rise of the Horde and tell the story of the Alliance invasion to Outland and the fate of Ner'zhul to set up the Lich King.

Like the pre-WoW story is really, really comprehensive. It's such an easy thing to adapt into films. I can't (well, I CAN) believe they fucked it up so god damned badly.

[Relapses]

Hundreds of thousands of viewers(who may or may not be actual current subscribers or payers, and may not even be actual people based on stories of ad vids) vs the millions of actual paying players.

That's why the argument is poor and the "evidence" is weak.

And you need to keep in mind my point was to either ditch raiding entirely, or go full tilt on it. The splitting of the focus is what's harmful, and results in watering down of other areas.

"Raiding is cancelled but we added more World Quests."

I don't like battle pets. I think dev time spent on battle pets is wasted. Is the natural conclusion for my opinion that Blizzard should now either focus all of their efforts on battle pets or simply remove them from the game?

WoW is many games to many people. Hyper focusing or eliminating features on a whim is hardly a productive use of developmental resources. You can have raiding and everything else. WoW's development is not a zero sum game.

Now, if you want to argue that it being TOO many thing to TOO many people is harmful, I'd agree here. You and I would obviously have differing opinions about WHICH features should and shouldn't exist... But on a fundamental level I feel like the game's ridiculously broad appeal has caused it to become a bit too watered down. Personally, I still find enjoyment in the game and while I understand other people don't, I'm not so arrogant to believe my idealized version of WoW is best for the long term health of the game. (WoD was the closest thing to my idealized version of WoW and we all know how that turned out.) Sadly, the sanitized monstrosity which is current retail WoW is a necessary trade off to keep itself in business.

All that said, SL seems to be a pretty decent departure so there's still more to this story to be seen.

[SirCowdog]

"Raiding is cancelled but we added more World Quests."

I don't like battle pets. I think dev time spent on battle pets is wasted. Is the natural conclusion for my opinion that Blizzard should now either focus all of their efforts on battle pets or simply remove them from the game?

WoW is many games to many people. Hyper focusing or eliminating features on a whim is hardly a productive use of developmental resources. You can have raiding and everything else. WoW's development is not a zero sum game.

Now, if you want to argue that it being TOO many thing to TOO many people, I'd agree here. You and I would obviously have differing opinions about WHICH features should and shouldn't exist... But on a fundamental level I feel like the game's ridiculously broad appeal has caused it to become a bit too watered down. Personally, I still find enjoyment in the game and while I understand other people don't, I'm not so arrogant to believe my idealized version of WoW is best for the long term health of the game. (WoD was the closest thing to my idealized version of WoW and we all know how that turned out.) Sadly, the sanitized monstrosity which is current retail WoW is a necessary trade off to keep itself in business.

All that said, SL seems to be a pretty decent departure so there's still more to this story to be seen.

Oof...so you start with a straw man? The open world being neglected due to an over-focus on raiding doesn't mean "add more WQs". In fact, WQs are the result of that neglect, and something that would badly need to be improved.

And while I don't personally like raiding as a concept, that's not the argument I'm making like you did with your example of pet battles. I'm saying that Blizzard has spent too much dev time on raiding, and that has caused other areas of the game to suffer. This isn't the same as "I don't like raiding so remove.it".

As for the zero sum game: I already pointed out that the WoW team is likely the largest and most well-funded MMO team in the world(as far as we know). And yet they still can't manage to provide a decent open world(see the WQ example).

"Remove all raiding" was perhaps hyperbolic, and maybe I should have instead said "remove raiding the primary and dominant focus of the game."

And you're correct that SL appears to be deviating from that formula. But it remains to be see in a live release. Blizzard has a habit of cutting things shown or hinted at during convention presentations.

[Niwes]

I miss all the "timewasting" RolePlaying stuff you used to have to do.

Sure, mixing up my own poisons, leveling skill points in a new weapon, finding a trainer to learn a new skill or filling my bags with arrows, flash powder or food for pets was a chore and PITA sometimes, but you didn't half feel a lot more connected to your class and they had much more unique personality.

Even the whole tamagotchi thing with hunters gave you a better bond with your pet.

this. /10c