This is what's wrong with modern WoW

[Sansnom]

Not the point. The point, which you utterly missed, is that they keep trying to tell you how to play. "No, you can't do this dungeon because you didn't do the zone quest yet". Why do that? They're controlling HOW you 'play the fucking game'.

And you fail to see that it is their game, they set the rules. Just as they do not release the raids until later. No flying. Lock outs etc.

See, retail only has yes men. You love everything Blizz does. It's kind of sad.

Would that make you a yes man also? You are playing retail so you too is a yes man, are you not? Because retail only has yes men?

I will apologies on your behalf to the other players who identifies their gender differently.

[Alkizon]

An alternative opinion/proposal, also while getting rid of phasing (aka individual visual progress of location, leaving it be server based)... and at the same time together with direct "constant" scaling (scaling is not necessary if each of expansions has adequately distributed levels' ranking (type of... first 10 levels are always starting location, and then you go by expansion's choice) that allows you to reach necessary, taken as maximum, point, also, in absence of system assuming/based on phasing, changing expansions in the process, with special desire, will be absolutely painless; scaling is always bad, it's censor's constant). In other words - no auto teleports/"motionless"-dungeons'spam, but they're always available "with your feet" (even if you have to go through part of location with mobs that are quite dangerous for a lone traveler, or already easier with automatically suggested "set" of fellow travelers), albeit not with entire volume of quests that can be "taken out of somewhere" due to direct and adequate organization of quests/lvling (without utilitarian degenerate simplification mechanisms).

9. Quests/leveling (&levels) +(+/+/+)+(+)

Considering all of above, there won't need to be afraid of "between expansions" problems availability of dungeons and their level requirements. In fact, most of work they have done recently, if not worsened situation, then at least was useless.

How about that, huh?

*barely audible recalls with unkind word this organization in Cata*

[Deneios]

The leveling and questing to 60 from 50 takes about 8-10 hours. If you dont have enough of a attention span for that mayby you should go get checked for adhd

[Siglius]

Right, cause I remember back in the good ol' days where I could do any dungeon I wanted..

Wait no. Old WoW had fucking attunements and you needed to WALK to the dungeon entrance. Something you can still do if you don't feel like using Blizzard's queue system. Nothing prevents you from getting summoned to Revendreth early if you wanna do HoA. Pretty sure it doesn't scale down so I wouldn't recommend it, but that's your choice.

[Eggroll]

I have to agree with the OP. Blizzard is all about hand holding and patronizing these days.

The very opposite of the concept of playing. RIP sandbox MMO. RIP exploration, RIP adventure.

[kukkamies]

Hehe I was expecting this thread to be people agreeing more with OP, since bitching on this forum seems popular. Maybe it was the "modern Wow" in the title, gotta defend it no matter what? Did see so many posts that reference specifically that part of title.

I wonder if this thread would have been completely different if the title was instead "Please don't go backwards, keep retail modern" but with exact same gameplay change.

[Djaye]

what i found quite funny was the tank who got super pissed at the rest of us for not knowing every fight in the first dungeon accessable, on the first day of expansion release. he humbled up a little when the four of us berated him for being a tool, but still...

[kamuimac]

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

they did it because on your main you are forced to do whole campaign whether you want it or not

if people would be able to level via dungeons they would then complain that they have to do campaign on max level to be able to play game.

thats the core of the problem

forced boring campaign that next to nobody wants to do or finish

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what i found quite funny was the tank who got super pissed at the rest of us for not knowing every fight in the first dungeon accessable, on the first day of expansion release. he humbled up a little when the four of us berated him for being a tool, but still...

well he was right though .

reading through dungeon quide on wowhead takes like 5 minutes.

[kattarina]

Aren't you able to queue for whatever you want with your second character? If so, whats the problem? You just have to do the story once, then you can queu for whatever you want sencon time around- this is a problem for like 2 days at most.

[huth]

What’s with this “don’t tell us how to play” crap any way? The game has always told you how to play rather it be attainments quest requirements or a thousand other other little locks here and there since vanilla.

I'd argue "telling you how to play" is basically a game developers job. And that's not limited to video games.

also while getting rid of phasing (aka individual visual progress of location, leaving it be server based)...

Yes, let's just leave everybody except for the early adopters in the dust. I'm sure that'll go over well.

You know, the entire reason they got phasing in the first place, so they could actually have individual progress.

[Alkizon]

huth
Yes, let's just leave everybody except for the early adopters in the dust. I'm sure that'll go over well.

You know, the entire reason they got phasing in the first place, so they could actually have individual progress.

I made a little correction of "aka individual visual progress of location, leaving it be server based" to further "in absence of system assuming/based on phasing". This doesn't change much on your question, but it emphasizes nature/requirements for open world design. That is, there should be world/server progress, if any, and this should be taken into account when organizing both questing/lvling and visual part of story development. Player never should have any individual progress affecting world around, Only! if - also for others. Want to tell private&dependent "story" - scenarios helped with that.

My separate attitude to their story "development and presentation" can be briefly seen here:

5) Lore:
Question is too complicated and I don't think that I have enough qualification to say something concretely, but if we base on theory that we are all just mercenaries and casual passers-by, then Classic still is best with it's quests organization, the rest are on descending (simply because they changed what would have been known earlier or used retcon, and the further the more). If we consider expansions as a "separate story to be told" then Classic didn't have much of it - it didn't impose you, but suggested to understand how world is arranged and where it all goes yourself. I always liked this approach better for this game. "Big story" is typical for a single player game, because it can be passed and it won't become "obsolete". For MMORPG imposition of the plot - is one of nails in coffin of expansions progress system (damage to open world like phasing, global changes etc. story becomes too detailed, global and centered on character, who nevertheless remains same weak-willed within its framework, hence dissonance, such approach is stupidity) and also partially of role-playing game. I can agree that MoP told us an interesting unattached to anything separate story, but it severely damaged my gameplay. WotLK told generally bad story, very incoherent and not consistent, although it had some little interesting elements. WoD was last expansion I saw, which repulsed all the interest of the game due to introduction of new characters models and judging by tendency to "dictate" the story, which they didn't have time to implement fully - it looked unfinished. Legion (base already on my friends' experience) looked one of the most stupid in terms of plotting (whose baton, judging by introductory events and irresponsible, incalculable allied races themes, will be catched by BfA, and SL?), but none of them did play further. I can't answer anything specifically on this point more than I did now.

So your statement in my case won't change anything at all, since I don't even consider this option/kind of design as MMO's working/permissible

an additional cherry on top of criticism's ice cream is, that ultimately story/path of progress is same for everyone, which means that one way or another it doesn't carry any semantic load even in their "perverted" design (in fact, this isn't an incentive to action, since kind of implementation will tear world apart even more, tilt will bend towards "individual/solo play", which, in my understanding, can never be interpreted as "better/more correct")

ps. Something tells me, that you have already seen both link and quote content (although, for a change, I'll cover myself with word)... probably

[Zalatoby]

The instant queueing has never made any sense since it's implementation. This is a brilliant solution, in my mind.

If blizz wanted to cater just a bit to OP (who seems to have fled this thread already) and his/her ilk, they could enable insta-queueing for alts, for those dungeons that has already been opened for on that account.
Makes sense, with a lot of the other account-wide stuff they've ben implementing for the past few expansions.

[Dracullus]

If THIS what's wrong with WoW, we are in good place people.

[Dhrizzle]

I have to agree with the OP. Blizzard is all about hand holding and patronizing these days.

The very opposite of the concept of playing. RIP sandbox MMO. RIP exploration, RIP adventure.

Funnily enough when Blizz put in a system that allowed you to queue for the instanced dungeons without going into the world people considered it a big blow against the sandbox, exploration and adventure aspects in favour of becoming a dungeon-crawler minigame.

[Kynario]

OT has Karen mindset

This. Karen doesn't want to play the game to achieve things. Just wants to be handed access to everything.

[Amerissis]

You know what I hate? That I go play some Call of Duty and I need to kill people! Or that I need to build stuff in SimCity. How dare they tell me how to play?!

Seriously. This is the game. They don't tell you how to play, this is how you play. If you don't like that, this is not the game for you. Just like shooters aren't for you if you don't like shooting and builders aren't for you if you don't like building.

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If blizz wanted to cater just a bit to OP (who seems to have fled this thread already) and his/her ilk, they could enable insta-queueing for alts, for those dungeons that has already been opened for on that account.

They have. Same post says: "On subsequent characters, all dungeons can be made immediately available to you via the Threads of Fate system."

[Drpizka]

OP means that his mentality is what is wrong with modern wow. I bet he also want free legendaries as well.

[dewd]

since you only get the dungeon quest for that particular zone at the end, why would you even want to run the dungeon before you get the quest?

[huth]

I made a little correction of "aka individual visual progress of location, leaving it be server based" to further "in absence of system assuming/based on phasing". This doesn't change much on your question, but it emphasizes nature/requirements for open world design. That is, there should be world/server progress, if any, and this should be taken into account when organizing both questing/lvling and visual part of story development. Player never should have any individual progress affecting world around, Only! if - also for others. Want to tell private&dependent "story" - scenarios helped with that.

And Blizzard implemented phasing precisely so they could do that, rather than being restricted to having to change the world for everybody, so i'm not sure why you would expect them to even consider this.

Also, no, it doesn't change much. Or anything, really, since you're just restating your point. Notably, it doesn't emphasise anything either, and linking to your other overly verbose posts won't help that. Try paring things down a bit, and maybe people will actually be able to find your points instead of getting lost in a sea of words.

[haiyken]

Yes, their insistence on having everyone do every story quest is super counterproductive, especially when the story quests alone take up about 95% of the XP you need.

That said, it's over within your first 10 hours of gameplay. It doesn't matter. I just dinged 60 and it's over. I don't ever want to do another leveling quest in Shadowlands ever again, and I can do that if I want to. My next characters will mostly likely just do dungeons with their rested XP.

What's funny is I don't think I've ever paid less attention to the storyline for an expansion, because it was so long and forced and repetitive. I literally have no idea what's going on. Every once in a while I'd see a familiar name on an NPC and be like, "Oh xxx is in here!", but mostly I didn't read anything I just click the shiny things and killed the mobs with exclamation marks.

In the past there were a lot of mindless side quests and a few main ones, and in this experience everything was a main one, so it's harder to zone out and then just pay attention to the few that seem important. And it also reflects how my brain works, when you make me feel like I'm exploring and have options I look around, but when you give me a railroad to ride on I don't really pay attention to the curves in the road.

What are you talking about ? All quest are story quests. They all tell a story.

Are you talking about the Campaign quests ? I have to disagree with you : it's neither long, forced or repetitive. Each zone actually have a different kind of storytelling, plot twists and characters. They all feel really different, but, of course, it's still WoW. Do you expect them to create a new game ? I'm confused. The flow between each storyline is one of the best they ever did and it feels the opposite of forced, it's really organic to jump from one campaign to the other, it makes sense. Ignoring the side quests make the leveling not that long either. I personnally did the most quests I could (Campaign + Side quests) in Bastion and Maladraxxus, and reached 60 while finishing the Campaign in Ardenweald, with a lot of side quests left to do. Shadowlands launched less than 48h ago : you can't say it's long... If anything, I found it too fast.

The issue is that you don't care at all about what they're offering in the expansion, you're not interested in the lore, the factions, the zones, etc. It's quite clear with your message. Why do you even play the game ?

About the OP : I'm quite fine with the dungeons unlocking this way. I liked that they gave me a quest when I could do them (at least in Bastion and Maldraxxus - still haven't done the others), so I didn't forgot. I think dungeons are a terrible way to level in Shadowlands, with so much content linked to the Covenants. I really needed that time in each zone to discover and try the abilities - and I'm still not sure about wich one to choose.

I also agree with some of you saying that Blizzard can do whatever they want, it's their game and it's fine if they want us to approach the game in a certain way for the first time. They want to tell a story, showcase new abilities and zones and characters... I'm glad they did it this way, and in my mind, it's a success !