Who lost its soul? Veteran Players or the Game?

[Saltysquidoon]

how have professions been killed?they are as alive and needed as ever,crafted gear is as strong as ever,its bis even for many

I mean professions are objectively and measurably weaker than in the past it's not even close (there even used to be reasons no to be alch). I mean there used to be a time when every profession offered their own enchant. Inscriptions had to have vantus runes invented for it to actually have a purpose at all.

[Big Thanks]

While I agree that a lot of things have changed, and the majority for the better in game development as a whole, I have to disagree about why things like RTS is not really that big anymore. RTS and 4x games are still a big thing (Crusader Kings 3 upcoming, new Civ games still coming etc.). The thing, big developers have gotten bigger. EA's "big" development team is not 60 people anymore, it is 300 people. A game selling "great" is not 2 million copies but 10 million. To do that you need to release on as many platforms at possible, and to reach for a wider audience. Anything niche is automatically out.

Think about how "single player games are dead" that was echoed for so long by EA and Activision, and in some ways they are right. If the goal is to earn a lot of money, and not to make a good game. Everyone wants the new Fortnite, the new CoD etc.

A lot of trends in game development are objective bad in my opinion. Loot boxes, ridiculous amounts of DLC, cut-up games to sell day-1 DLC etc.

You can't tell me that "It is 2020, not 2005, people want DLC and Loot Boxes these days buddy!". No one wants it except for greedy executives and shareholders drowning in their own pits of avarice.

The reason why i shared this is because i started playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and this game single handedly made me read text.
And i was like..."what tha hell...im reading quest text for the first time in years"

Ofcourse is because this is a Dungeons & Dragons inspired game just with a different setting BUT i was so surprised by HOW it managed to make me feel immersed.
It was my first introduction to this genre of Dungeons & Dragons, top view, turn based strategy RPG.

SO...if im reading text in this game for 30min straight and sometimes even 1 hour...why cant i read quest text in wow?

[deenman]

I mean professions are objectively and measurably weaker than in the past it's not even close (there even used to be reasons no to be alch). I mean there used to be a time when every profession offered their own enchant. Inscriptions had to have vantus runes invented for it to actually have a purpose at all.

for personal use yea,many prof you could claim you dont need them yourself,but you still need the stuff they provide,and like i said,the crafting ones offer endgame bis items,that has happened very rarerly in the past

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They also allowed people to understand their class, and understand the game.

Some other stats gave you progression, like ArPe, i still remember the day i finally got the 1400 rating of ArPe, i spent almost an hour replacing my arPe gems for strenght ones.

Look at wow today, its just drop gear and you donne, there is no class learning, there is no progression feeling, its just Zerg mode. You hit max level you get the top gear, and you ready for a raid even if you don't even understand your class.

very wrong,the stats you have today can make a huge impact in your dps,thats why you should always sim

[Zogarth]

The reason why i shared this is because i started playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall, and this game single handedly made me read text.
And i was like..."what tha hell...im reading quest text for the first time in years"

Ofcourse is because this is a Dungeons & Dragons inspired game just with a different setting BUT i was so surprised by HOW it managed to make me feel immersed.
It was my first introduction to this genre of Dungeons & Dragons, top view, turn based strategy RPG.

SO...if im reading text in this game for 30min straight and sometimes even 1 hour...why cant i read quest text in wow?

Same, it is a great game. I had the same feeling when I played Pillars of Eternity, and Divinity: Original Sin. They are old-school but also modern in other ways. But the thing is... how many copies did those games sell? They can't ever get close to the amount of sales as the bigger genres, so we are left with smaller or "niche" developers to make them.

Also... comparing a game like Shadowrun and WOW is silly when it comes to story. WoW hasn't really ever been very focused on the story. The game was and is carried by all other features. A game like Shadowrun has its story as its main draw, while WoW had/has community as the main draw to keep you around.

WoW is also telling you actively through its other mechanics that the story isn't what you are supposed to focus on. You don't get rewarded for knowing the story and reading text, while in a game like Shadowrun you very often are. The information written there matters in Shadowrun, while it doesn't in WoW. The quest text isn't the content, it is just fluff, while in Shadowrun it is an integral part of the content.

[deenman]

If you seriously want to tell me that crafted gear is more relevant today than in Vanilla / TBC, i am going to end this discussion right here.
Especially if you take into account how much time it took for a player to get those crafted items.

That's how Warrior worked in WoD.

Because it was just good in PvP and nowhere else, right?

Again, this is just the defense stat, not Dodge, Parry or Block.

Doesn't mean that every item has to a copy of another one.

why does the time matter so much?also depending on luck you can get those items in vanila very quick,and buy the rest from ah,today you need the mats from bosses that you cant just farm in one day,and yes,crafted gear today is bis for their slots for many classes,this was very rarerly the case in the past,vanila had a few yea

yeah,defence for not getting crit but you needed the dodge parry and block % to make you never take a full hit,i forget what it was 94% i think,and after that you would never want any extra defensive stats,you wanted dps stats to give you more aggro or just extra dmg

[Nobleshield]

Both. Min-maxing/esport/competitive culture has infested everything and ruined everything since now everything has to be a competition to show how you are better than your peers. So you see things like min-maxing to the nines to the extreme of shunning anyone who isn't at 110% optimal, to things like meters and parses and Raider.IO which encourages being an elitist prick to show how much better you are. As a result games have embraced it. WoW took the opposite approach of an MMORPG and started to cater more and more to this extreme culture, adding Diablo 3 style gameplay and e-sport mentality with M+ and the like, so now you have an "MMORPG" which is basically an e-sport.

Both lost its way. The gaming genre changed the last I don't know, 10? years or so into where everyone wants to be the very best so it's a race/contest against your peers and if you aren't theorycrafting everything to the utmost extreme you are some subhuman. And this mindset has gotten into almost everything. I don't think there is an MMORPG out there anymore which doesn't have these people coming in and polluting it. So there is no game currently that has the feel of an actual RPG where the emphasis isn't on doing "homework" to max out on everything.

Games have lost the RPG aspect of MMORPGs but part of that is because the players have become more more competitive and gameplay focused so they stopped caring about the RPG aspects.

[Big Thanks]

Same, it is a great game. I had the same feeling when I played Pillars of Eternity, and Divinity: Original Sin. They are old-school but also modern in other ways. But the thing is... how many copies did those games sell? They can't ever get close to the amount of sales as the bigger genres, so we are left with smaller or "niche" developers to make them.

Also... comparing a game like Shadowrun and WOW is silly when it comes to story. WoW hasn't really ever been very focused on the story. The game was and is carried by all other features. A game like Shadowrun has its story as its main draw, while WoW had/has community as the main draw to keep you around.

WoW is also telling you actively through its other mechanics that the story isn't what you are supposed to focus on. You don't get rewarded for knowing the story and reading text, while in a game like Shadowrun you very often are. The information written there matters in Shadowrun, while it doesn't in WoW. The quest text isn't the content, it is just fluff, while in Shadowrun it is an integral part of the content.

I agree with everything you said.

But (i think, not sure) while its true you are never rewarded by reading the story in WoW (contrary to shadowrun), dont you think is kinda "messed up" Blizzard creating 500 quests every new expansion, and according to you its just "fluff"?

I think...is kinda strange.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Game lost it.

• WoW was a social game for casuals. Content was hard and required you to group up to complete it. The most prestigious content were the 40 man/25 man raids, but there were a small subsection of the community.

• The hardcore raiders with their calculators and spreadsheets were the most vocal. They were the vocal minority and over time were incorrectly perceived to be representative of the playerbase at large.

• Eventually those hardcore raiders became members of the development team, and began changing the game to revolve around raiding. Vast majority of content for non-raiders was axed. You can only get the best gear from raiding now, not from your preferred type of content (reputations, crafting, PvP, etc), and those types of content were axed (reputation dailies with hubs and overarching questlines were dropped for forgettable, tedious world quests. Removal of justice, valor, and conquest point vendors. Crafting was left to rot, etc). Classes were designed to be balanced in a raiding environment, not to be fun to play with across the entire game. Layers and layers of RNG were added, with your item having 1. a chance to proc with the stats you wanted, 2. a chance to proc with the sockets you wanted, 3. a chance to proc a titanforge, on top of 4. the chance for that item to even drop at all.

• "You know you do, but you don't" exposes how truly out of touch Blizzard is with their playerbase. "If you want to play a fair-haired, light-skinned, blue-eyed majestic high-elf, sorry but…the Horde is waiting for you!"

Sorry, but I don't give money to people who took what I liked about the game away from me and tried to sell me what I didn't want, and then insult me when I ask for what I wanted in the first place. I'll resub once Blizzard gets their act together again.

[Tuor]

very wrong,the stats you have today can make a huge impact in your dps,thats why you should always sim

Ohhh, really? So lets give it a try. I haven't played WoW since cata, and the very last time i logged with my main account was during MoP, so lets see if i can guest the stat used by Fury Warriors... Keep adding Crits has much has you can and you'll be alright?

So were is the desition? Back in wrath you had the crit school, that asked people to gear their warriors for agility, and you had the ArPe school that required you to become soft (70%) or hard capped (100%, 1400 ArPe rating), you could build your character as much has you wished. Now look today, that's it, keep staking crit and you'll be ok... Great...

[Zogarth]

I agree with everything you said.

But (i think, not sure) while its true you are never rewarded by reading the story in WoW (contrary to shadowrun), dont you think is kinda "messed up" Blizzard creating 500 quests every new expansion, and according to you its just "fluff"?

I think...is kinda strange.

Quests themselves are not fluff, but the story in every individual quest is. The details are. Most still get the overall story just from gameplay and in-game cinematics, while how many know why you had to kill those 10 boars? And does it really matter?

Quests are a vehicle to tell you what to do. It is to give you a direction to level up and to progress through a zone and the overall narrative of said zone.

[Beefhammer]

The developers? Everything in "modern" WoW is made to keep you logged in and churn out those MAU's for Gobby Kotick and his precious shareholders. That is understandable and the way it's always been to a certain extent, it's just that the activities that keep you logged in have over time become a banal slog. You're very heavily encouraged to keep logging in EVERY SINGLE DAY to keep up with the latest grind, whether it's AP, essences, currency for cloak upgrades or just plain old gold. You know those "free" games where you yourself are actually the product for the corporation? That's what modern wow feels like, except you even pay to play wow.

Catchup mechanisms either don't exist or come way too late for people who cba with all the fluff that is required to keep up with todays raiding / competitive m+ environment. I'm excited for Shadowlands, where "loot will be loot" again apparently. I'm still holding off on buying it and probably won't until I get to play the alpha / beta. First sign of whatever bullshit grind they've come up with this time around to keep me churning out MAUs, and I'm skipping this one.

Just like all the things in vanilla that slowed things down to keep you logging in to play. It's a fucking MMO. They are designed to keep you playing for long periods of time. Modern WoW is no different than old WoW. Just the mechanisms employed to keep you playing are different.

[Dormie]

The problem with retail is the playerbase. Most of the "real" WoW players left around Cata and didn't come back. The current game is a result of entitled players wanting their cake and eating it too.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

its both. the dev's have mad bad choices but alot of those choices have been made because of the players.

[Beefhammer]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't making a good game make the most money for them?

This is why I cannot take anyone seriously that believes it's all about the shareholders. 1st, AB is owned by 91% by institutional shares which are non voting shares. SO right off the bat, the shareholders are kind of meaningless as they see AB as a safe bet. 2, if a company only went for the money grab and made all it's decisions to appease shareholders, players would see right through it and leave in a game like this.

It's right up there with the lazy dev comments.

[deenman]

Ohhh, really? So lets give it a try. I haven't played WoW since cata, and the very last time i logged with my main account was during MoP, so lets see if i can guest the stat used by Fury Warriors... Keep adding Crits has much has you can and you'll be alright?

So were is the desition? Back in wrath you had the crit school, that asked people to gear their warriors for agility, and you had the ArPe school that required you to become soft (70%) or hard capped (100%, 1400 ArPe rating), you could build your character as much has you wished. Now look today, that's it, keep staking crit and you'll be ok... Great...

no,you cant just stack crit,stats have diminishing returns,depending on the stats on a an item vs the stats on your character,one item even with lower ilvl can be a better upgrade,stats synergies differently these days,also you got azerite to take in to account,different traits need different stats,coruption,essences,the game today is like 10 times more complex than cata,granted i wish reforging was back

[Casperite]

Being good for the players and being good for the shareholders aren't always the same thing.

Edit:Here's just one example. If you played Legion you probably know about the addon that grouped players together for world quests to make the tedious AP grind a little faster. This game at its core is about playing efficient and grouping for those WQs made it *VERY* efficient, timewise. Sure, you had leechers who contributed nothing but overall for me it was an enjoyable player-made feature. Cue end of Legion, the addon was broken on purpose because "people were doing the """content""" faster than the timeframe that Blizzard had in mind. There's an actual quote from one of the devs around that time, I think it's in one of the interviews. That's content literally designed to be a timesink. Great for shareholders because people are online for longer, bad for players because the reward to time invested ratio shifts negatively.

Edit2: Not to mention the meme that they literally said "well if you're gonna be grouping, we'll have to increase the amount of mobs you're required to kill from 5 to 30" and yet here we are, addon broken and still some horrible "fill the bar" quests giving 1-3% per mob kill. Atrocious design.

All games and forms of entertainment are purposefully designed to be time sinks. Not sure what your point is here other than wow is like other games, a waste of time objectively speaking.

[Kralljin]

why does the time matter so much?

Why do you think is M+ so popular for gearing? Because it's the fastest method.

also depending on luck you can get those items in vanila very quick,and buy the rest from ah

Since there's no WoW Token in Classic, you had to farm the gold for it, which is good because that meant that you had to find a way to make gold and interact with the world (and by extension, your own professions).

today you need the mats from bosses that you cant just farm in one day

So you just wait for two lockouts, craft your item, then never care about it again in any fashion.

yeah,defence for not getting crit but you needed the dodge parry and block % to make you never take a full hit,i forget what it was 94% i think,and after that you would never want any extra defensive stats,you wanted dps stats to give you more aggro or just extra dmg

Being uncrushable is a totally different thing, which was easy to reach for Pally / Warr because they had talents / abilities that gave them extra block chance.
A blocked hit will never be a crushing blow.

However, simply because you'll never get a crushing blow, doesn't mean those stats were worthless, just being hit on its own was still dangerous.
If you went on some rather hardhitting bosses full TPS, your healers will suffer for it.

For Feral Tank however, crushing blows were just unavoidable unless you had like 104% dodge.


And with all due respect, your spelling makes it very difficult to read and understand those sentences.

[Beefhammer]

The problem with retail is the playerbase. Most of the "real" WoW players left around Cata and didn't come back. The current game is a result of entitled players wanting their cake and eating it too.

You have zero evidence of that. Considering WoW has had well over 100M registered accounts, I could argue that most of them left before Cata when WoW was it's most popular.

[qwerty123456]

I've been playing since vanilla beta and I don't have any sense of numbness although there are days and sometimes weeks where I don't log in because some other game I play has a limited time event I gotta grind out.

[Beefhammer]

I think its a bit of both but more the game if I am being honest.

WoW has over time tried to appeal more and more to a wider audience at the cost of what the game was. The result is a much diminished experience for everyone involved.

The high end player has to slog though hour upon hours of content so utterly below their skill level it begs the question why there isn't a auto complete feature for them. This build contempt towards the lower skilled players as suddenly the thing barring them from their preferred mode (be it mythic, glad, mythic+). Is days worth of grinding content not meant for them.

This in turn gives most lower end players a feeling of resentment from never really getting a chance to learn how the game works. Systems put in place for extremely valid reasons are seen as pointless gate keeping as the divide between high end players and low end has never been higher.

I think at some point wow just has to decide what it wants to be.

I mean the game was considered baby's first MMO by pretty much everyone in the MMO scene. It was incredibly accessible to a very wide range of players. Many never played a game before tried and WoW as their first game. So saying they tried to appeal to an even wider audience is asinine considering it was for everyone back in 2004. They did, however, make top end activities that required massive amounts of time investments and guild participation more accessible to those with out said time to invest or desire to participate in guilds. Same audience, more accessibility. But that is Blizzard in a nutshell, make games they like accessible and appealing to the masses.