Returning Player getting "Overwhelmed"

[Lei]

That's the game. How different fun factor is from running hc's or doing dalies to no end back in a day or waiting a week because dungeon is on lock out? I can't see much of the difference from "great old days" of WoW besides of how my game style changed. Griding for weeks is not a case for alts at all and if someone skipped 8.2 they will need to catch up with flying anyway. It's no different than skipping a patch back in a day.
I would have agreed on corruptions a week ago as it was an RNG drop and that kinda sucked as the system is good on itself, but the way of getting corruptions was intentionally rng with no targeting. Now? This is 100% same design as arena vendors. Pooling AP for weeks for whatever rating you get and the buying an item later. Pooling dkp for an item drop from a boss until it dropped and then spending it. I can't comprehend how those systems were somehow better than what we have now.
Not all essences are time gated either - people can go ahead and farm that blood of the enemy in few days if they want to like good old back in the day system.

The difference is that in wotlk for example you did your heroics, your dailies, your hypothetical getting back to guild took you to alt raids or main raids depending on your gear/skill level, you got leftover gear, but at the end of the day, you were DONE in 2-3 hours + raiding nights. Farming for weeks wasn't really weeks, but in any case, it was daily 2-3 hours (with searching for daily heroic group on trade, before the group finder) TOPS. compare that to todays chores. How much time day to keep your AP up to date? Farming essences? Visions? Corruption gear? If everyone could just be simply HONEST here and check their /played or start a clock in the background to check how much time they spend in the game. That'd be great. Not now, when the expansion is pretty much over. When 8.2 dropped. When 8.3 dropped and a couple of weeks later.

[Lurker1]

Hold out until Shadowlands, thats when the new player experience(At least IMO) will not be as well "Going up a mountain."

terrible advice i love BFA not sure if it will be the same for shadowlands.

[The Butt Witch]

Dude, go back into the void. Come back in SL.

[crakerjack]

It's because outside of dungeons, raids, PvP, art, music, story, the expansion fucking sucks. Almost every feature they created for BFA is total dog shit. It's so bad that none of them are being carried over to Shadowlands. Azerite traits, sucked. Essences, sucked. Corruption, absolute dog shit. It really is a disservice to the art, music, story, dungeons, raids (excluding that shit Uldir raid) and PvP teams because most people will consider this expansion dog shit even though those categories were fine. It just goes to show that half-assed features can ruin an expansion. Thank god they're not carrying that crap over to Shadowlands. The best thing to take from this is that blizzard knows what works and what doesn't and hopefully they won't reproduce that shit.

[Elias01]

The difference is that in wotlk for example you did your heroics, your dailies, your hypothetical getting back to guild took you to alt raids or main raids depending on your gear/skill level, you got leftover gear, but at the end of the day, you were DONE in 2-3 hours + raiding nights. Farming for weeks wasn't really weeks, but in any case, it was daily 2-3 hours (with searching for daily heroic group on trade, before the group finder) TOPS. compare that to todays chores. How much time day to keep your AP up to date? Farming essences? Visions? Corruption gear? If everyone could just be simply HONEST here and check their /played or start a clock in the background to check how much time they spend in the game. That'd be great. Not now, when the expansion is pretty much over. When 8.2 dropped. When 8.3 dropped and a couple of weeks later.

Do you also know what has changed since WOTLK? Game become vastly acessible compared to older expansions and people start running out of content becouse of it as content become more and more easyer to finish, specialy after introduction of LFR. M i supostu remind you WoD and WoW lossing over 5M players as game had literaly no content outside of sitting in our garrison? Thats why Blizzard in Legion and in BFA introduct all those new grindy systems so casuals have something to do.

Maybe just maybe if game wouldnt be so acessible and easy to finish we wouldnt need more artificial grinding systems to keep players busy. Acessability decrese playtime and Blizzard had to offset it somehow.

[erifwodahs]

The difference is that in wotlk for example you did your heroics, your dailies, your hypothetical getting back to guild took you to alt raids or main raids depending on your gear/skill level, you got leftover gear, but at the end of the day, you were DONE in 2-3 hours + raiding nights. Farming for weeks wasn't really weeks, but in any case, it was daily 2-3 hours (with searching for daily heroic group on trade, before the group finder) TOPS. compare that to todays chores. How much time day to keep your AP up to date? Farming essences? Visions? Corruption gear? If everyone could just be simply HONEST here and check their /played or start a clock in the background to check how much time they spend in the game. That'd be great. Not now, when the expansion is pretty much over. When 8.2 dropped. When 8.3 dropped and a couple of weeks later.

Well but that is the game for many mate. Farming m+ and pushing keys is the best fun I had since I have started. Catching up on a new char in essences like two to three days max. But you can grind that stuff. You can literally be a HC raid ready in less than a week.
A new player will always take months to catch up in any MMORPG game.

[Dundebuns]

what's the alternative? getting everything handed to you immediately that took other players months to get and then blasting through the current content, 2 weeks later saying there's nothing to do?

I did quite a few of the long grinds when they became available, yet I have absolutely no issue with players getting those same rewards for a comparatively small amount of time spent several months after they came out. The presitge of getting them sooner was the reward of the work done then. People really need to let go of this 'Well I slogged my behind off for this shiny trinket, so people trying to get the same trinket a year after it came out should have to do the same stuff despite relevance.'

[erifwodahs]

easier, maybe, depending on how you view easy. longer - almost certainly. and there really is a ton of different things all over the place, it can be overwhelming. it used to be more... focused if you will. easier to figure out a course of action as returning player. the game is a LOT more scattered nowadays, while also time gating you and for me, I'd rather have an OPTION of one sitting OR being able to spread it across multiple play sessions. there isn't that option anymore. its kinda amazing how the game can be simultaneously scattered, while also being very rigid about how it lets you do things. meh. as another recent poster, I took a look at it all, and decided that its just not worth the bother, outside of the basics (like unlocking allied races and stuff, and I know rep requirement is going away with expac, but I'd rather get this now, so that expac stays for expac things, with a bit less catching up on old content)

but in the old games there were no way to catch up on old stuff mate. New character now is easy to level, fast to grind through. Rank 3 essences for a new character can take a while, but that's nothing to compare to when you needed to get AP for current PvP set, but for that you needed to grind bgs for hundreds of thousands of honour and hundreds of marks. Or badges of justice/WotLK badges were catch up.. for one item you needed to do like 10 to 15 dungeons and it had weekly lock. Raids had one ID so a bad pug meant no loot at all for the rest of the week.

[arkanon]

but in the old games there were no way to catch up on old stuff mate. New character now is easy to level, fast to grind through. Rank 3 essences for a new character can take a while, but that's nothing to compare to when you needed to get AP for current PvP set, but for that you needed to grind bgs for hundreds of thousands of honour and hundreds of marks. Or badges of justice/WotLK badges were catch up.. for one item you needed to do like 10 to 15 dungeons and it had weekly lock. Raids had one ID so a bad pug meant no loot at all for the rest of the week.

The catch up gear may have been slightly less (not is limited as you suggest, not by a long shot) but it was FAR more powerful compared to the highest gear in the game. Vanilla had very limited catchup, since then, its been a core part of the expansion cycle. Additionally, 1-60 remained the only real time sink - if you had more than one lvl 60 character, which many did, lvling that alt did not take long in TBC, and you could jump almost immediately into Kara, Gruul, Mag (later on), as well as heroics.

Yes, 1-60 remained a big wall for quite a while, but eventually that barrier was dramatically reduced.

[Lei]

Or badges of justice/WotLK badges were catch up.. for one item you needed to do like 10 to 15 dungeons and it had weekly lock.

This is simply not true. I suggest you to go to any wow page and re-read what you remember about the emblem system. Not to mention how the emblem system wasn't the only way to catch up. What about the icc dungeons when icc came out, ToC dungeon when ToC came out. Yeah ulduar didn't have dungeon, but the starter gear was kind of good. There was not much to catch up to. Vault of Archavon?

Crafting was a thing. Crafting was affordable (orbs from raids were sellable), and yielded the BiS for that tier anyways, so you wanted to craft those, regardless. Buying a crafted item from the previous raid was also viable, the itemlevel difference wasn't this huge like now.

There were 2 types of emblems in one tier, one for high level reward, and one for lower level, so you could work for 2 ilevel bracket stuff at once. Aka 2 slots at once.
Server wide pug community was a thing that recognized your name too, not just your current gear/RIO score. VoA gave you easy loot. Wintergrasp gave you amazing honor too.
Weekly raid quest was a thing that gave emblems and was puggable: bosses from naxx, ulduar, toc, even in icc.
Random dungeons gave emblems.

If you had a guild, they could just boost you and shower you in gear. People used to do this even in pugs, well that was something. You could be raid ready in 1-2 raid lockout.
Honor farming was very easy. My hunter was in full "shitty" honor gear in a couple of daily hours of play, the biggest task was to FIND THAT PVP VENDOR FOR SURE . Because i could jsut buy stuff into slots I wanted in the order I wanted. Whaow.

This? Now? I don't even want to raid or log in for that matter on my main, let alone alts.

[scvd]

Yes, truly disgusting that a company wants to make money. Unreal.

Lmao, fuck off, I ain't taking the bait with a name like that.

[Declaron]

I know where your coming from, I came back 3 weeks ago and I’ve already unsubbed. The game is a mess, it took me 10 hours to get to 120, it then took me give or take 30 hours to get to ilvl 450, my neck to 83 and my cloak to level 9. All of the old raid content is completely redundant, Nya LFR and Normal are completely redundant, heroic is pug clear farm and for what purpose unless you can get into a mythic prog team, which you can’t because you have no mythic xp and they dont need you. So I did 1 island expedition, not really sure what the point is, so I did 1 warfront, it was ok, forgettable really. So now I look at what I could do, I’ve got the “main story quests” but I already know the ending so I don’t care. Pvp is completely broken. So I’m like hmm... I’ll go play C&C remastered for free instead.

[arkanon]

"I took a break for a year and now there's so much to do wtf bad game?"

.

Valid or otherwise, I believe the actual complaint is "I took a break for a year, and now there is so much boring, repetitive, grindy brain-dead content behind time gates that i have to farm before i am able to engage competitively in even the moderate levels of difficulty of the content i actually enjoy, even though my skill level far exceeds these remedial tasks"

[shadowmatrix]

I wonder how people complaining about WOW's despite it's catch mechanics would handle the FF 14 MSQ. Gratz on hitting 50, now go do about 80 quests to unlock the ability to start doing Heavensward content.

[erifwodahs]

This is simply not true. I suggest you to go to any wow page and re-read what you remember about the emblem system. Not to mention how the emblem system wasn't the only way to catch up. What about the icc dungeons when icc came out, ToC dungeon when ToC came out. Yeah ulduar didn't have dungeon, but the starter gear was kind of good. There was not much to catch up to. Vault of Archavon?

Crafting was a thing. Crafting was affordable (orbs from raids were sellable), and yielded the BiS for that tier anyways, so you wanted to craft those, regardless. Buying a crafted item from the previous raid was also viable, the itemlevel difference wasn't this huge like now.

There were 2 types of emblems in one tier, one for high level reward, and one for lower level, so you could work for 2 ilevel bracket stuff at once. Aka 2 slots at once.
Server wide pug community was a thing that recognized your name too, not just your current gear/RIO score. VoA gave you easy loot. Wintergrasp gave you amazing honor too.
Weekly raid quest was a thing that gave emblems and was puggable: bosses from naxx, ulduar, toc, even in icc.
Random dungeons gave emblems.

If you had a guild, they could just boost you and shower you in gear. People used to do this even in pugs, well that was something. You could be raid ready in 1-2 raid lockout.
Honor farming was very easy. My hunter was in full "shitty" honor gear in a couple of daily hours of play, the biggest task was to FIND THAT PVP VENDOR FOR SURE . Because i could jsut buy stuff into slots I wanted in the order I wanted. Whaow.

This? Now? I don't even want to raid or log in for that matter on my main, let alone alts.

If you have a guild who wants to boos you you could raid in retail in two weekly lockouts easy. Buying items from previous tiers and crafting is still a thing also, tho limited to two items except that you don't need to level your crafting through 2 older game versions but you don't need to because game showers you with gear
"Shitty gear" is all over the place you get previous raid mythic level gear from emissaries and conquest points now. HC warfronts give HC loot quality and m+ I don't even talk about those. +11 drops HC level raid gear. You could clear +11 in time with previous tier normal level gear, skilled players with previous tiers mythic gear can clear 15 in time, but you can get HC level geared from +11s. It's like getting normal level ICC gear in god damn hc dungeons except unlike raids - it's farmable.
You can ponder as much as you want, but farming 10 dungeons to get amblems for that one "previos tier bis" level item is nothing compared to getting an item once in couple of dungeons and that item will more powerful than anything before.
Than add visions where you get 470 corrupted which is almost mythic level raid item and then we have corruption vendors/chance to get corrupted items. I mean how is that not easier than anything pre-mop

- - - Updated - - -

I wonder how people complaining about WOW's despite it's catch mechanics would handle the FF 14 MSQ. Gratz on hitting 50, now go do about 80 quests to unlock the ability to start doing Heavensward content.

Many just uses the point to shit on WoW. I agree on the new player part that it should have way better tracking/guidance for what has to be done to get to the current tier of playing. But for older wow players? Come on. "But I have to do dalies to get my rank lucid" "I have to do war campaign"... WoW, those people are expected to play the game..... mindblowing... and then you get a random guy who says "everything is meaningless and I know the story so I might not even do the quests"... How stupid that is? So what? Blizz should do a re-cap story book in game and remove all the quests because the ending is spoiled online? Could they remove loremaster questing requirement too as I don't want to do all the old quests and I have done most of it on my other characters.... I mean... what?

[Raelbo]

I agree gear should really cap out at 425 outside of group content and there shouldn't be these "events" that hand out powerful gear.

I really struggle to understand this attitude, largely because people seem to like to state it without ever bothering to explain their reasoning. As if it should be obvious, when, to me, it's obviously daft.

People should be doing harder content to gear not simply log in everyday.

It stands to reason that there should be a strong correlation between gear quality and the effort it takes to earn it. I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. That doesn't mean that all good gear needs to be locked behind difficult and/or inaccessible content. And I really don't understand where you get a baseline of 425 from, because even at 450, you're going to be massively behind people doing actual hard content (Mythic Raids, high end M+, 4-5 mask visions).

It's almost as if your entire motivation here is just to punish anyone who you believe is inferior to you as harshly as possible. You do realise that the purpose of this game is to be fun and to entertain, not to punish and ridicule?

[JustMYchanges]

So i came back a Week ago after i took a break Shortly before the Eternal Palace Patch (8.2 - 8.2.5 i think)

And i totally got overwhelmed with all the stuff i have to do to get back into the Game (cleared BoD on Mythic aswell as pushed ~20keys)

Ranking up Essences takes so fucking long (5 Weeks for Conflict and Strive if your Arena rating is under 1600 and i cant manage to break the 1600 and it would still take 3 Weeks, yeah i suck at PvP, but never had that much trouble getting to 1600)

I'm kinda lucky i have a friend that carried me through my 15+ Key for the Weekly Chest aswell as Nya'Lotha HC with his Guild, but still since 1 1/2 Weeks i'm doing nothing else than Dailys (Yay Lucid Dreams is pretty much mandatory for Fire).

Or am i Missing something, since if not the New player Experience in BfA is utter Garbage, no Wonder WoW dosnt get any New Players :S

Dont get this arguement at all. I came back to wow about a month ago from legion and in 2 weeks i had 3/4 rank 3 essences (4th on the third week).

476 ilvl atm with rank 15 cloak and 89? 88? Neck. Twilight dev 5

So essentially caught up in 3 weeks. Not bad at all. From what i heard and all the reeeeeeing on here i expected it to be bad.

For like 30 mins if that of "work" a day if thats OMG SO UNBEARABLE have you ever played wow?

[owbu]

I really struggle to understand this attitude, largely because people seem to like to state it without ever bothering to explain their reasoning. As if it should be obvious, when, to me, it's obviously daft.



It stands to reason that there should be a strong correlation between gear quality and the effort it takes to earn it. I don't think anyone is arguing otherwise. That doesn't mean that all good gear needs to be locked behind difficult and/or inaccessible content. And I really don't understand where you get a baseline of 425 from, because even at 450, you're going to be massively behind people doing actual hard content (Mythic Raids, high end M+, 4-5 mask visions).

It's almost as if your entire motivation here is just to punish anyone who you believe is inferior to you as harshly as possible. You do realise that the purpose of this game is to be fun and to entertain, not to punish and ridicule?

I'm sorry, but telling someone he has a superiority complex, because his desired reward to "punishment" ratio is different to yours (because I can garantuee you that there is a point in the game, where you would also feel like the game is too rewarding - just think about something absurd like "why dont we get legendaries for dieing? Do you want to ridicule and punish me for playing the game MY way? Maybe I WANT to repeatedly jump off a tower? The game is supposed to be fun!") is a bit silly. Especially when you have to define "punishment" as "only gets rewarded according to the effort/gear quality curve" that you yourself have acknowledged should exist.

Dont get me wrong, I'm okay with some catch up mechanisms and gear that is a bit above said curve (emissary rewards for instance). But your opinion on where the sweet spot is isnt any more objective than his. And wanting the game to adhere a bit more rigorous to the curve than you want is not a character flaw. Its just a gameplay preferance.

[Talrath]

dont you need 4800 experience with the followers to get rank 3 lucid dreams? So claiming that you can get it within 10 days is just stupid. Blood of the enemy is a pain to get aswell, especially if you havent done a BG in BFA like me. I got a rank 2 and not even going to try rank 3.

[crusadernero]

I've been playing my Paladin(main) a bit. Since I tank with him, I get access to the content I want to clear(m+/raids). I got the stuff I need to clear on a OK difficulty.

Decided to lvl a monk for heritage on Kul tiran and when I reached max lvl I realised I had to focus on 1 alt. Theres so much grinding for alot of stuff I had more than enough doing it on my main, let alone alts. I have 6 120s as Alliance but only my main is really up to date.

So I figured, screw this monk and I picked up my Rogue again. I just do bgs, dungeons, WQs and alot of Wpvp. I dont really focus to much on all the grinds cause my rogue give alot of fun anyway.

Slowly but steadily my rogue is getting geared, but I can also see that no matter what I do I end up with the choice of having to grind my arse off in order to be up to date. Will probably scrap it once my sub runs out in about 1 month.

Its just to much work this late in a xpac. If this system was fleshed out in 8.1 or something, I would probably have a couple of characters up to date. But now I cant be bothered. The grind is to much, epecially now that its summertime. Easier to drop playing games this time of year.

Once you have seen the content there is to see, I would recommend either leveling characters you might want to play in SL cause the XP boost is really good, or just unsub and take a decent break until atleast pre patch. All of the stuff we grind for now is useless in SL anyway, and it just feels bad doing all that grind when SL aint that far away.