If 9.1 Bombs...

[FarmerEd]

Change expansion structure but not what you propose. Wow needs MUCH more frequent patches to justify the sub price to many of us.

[Coldkil]

Didn't bother reading all 13 pages, so maybe i'm gonna say something other people has said already.

I think WoW is still good, but has terrible management team behind - especially the ones that decide what's "good for the game and the players". The more the game goes, the more you see how all the systems are just tailored to keep people playing. Not the "it's interesting things that keep people hooked" but "infinite time sinks just because otherwise players would burn through content".

The issue is that this mentality is a dinosaur at best. Long gone are the games that keep people playing constantly for years. The design shouldn't revolve about having daily tasks to do otherwise you fall back, because while it's an extremely powerful drive, it just makes most people annoyed by the fact that no matter what they do they're not gonna be on par of others (whatever is your "category" of player). Reason why most people just come in, check the expansion, se that actually nothing changed from 6 years ago or more and stop playing. The others are the ones mostly obsessed with ladders and rankings because they need something that tells them they're not wasting their time for nothing.

Beware: i don't hate SL. I actually like it a lot so far and plan to play it over and over. But Blizzard should just stop designing the game around bringing players to pay a sub until next patch hits. They should just make good stuff and let players come and go, because that's what they're doing anyway. Make a good content patch that lasts 2 months for the fast people, and then let them go, and make the following patch even better so people come back.

Their focus on keeping people paying the sub is what is killing the game. It's not content drought, it's just making it as slow as possible before gamers get tired so they can rake more money from subs/bots/game time while delivering the same amount of updates, or even less if possible. All the free developer time they can get is developer time that can be invested in something else that nets them additional/more money.

[Armourboy]

Didn't bother reading all 13 pages, so maybe i'm gonna say something other people has said already.

I think WoW is still good, but has terrible management team behind - especially the ones that decide what's "good for the game and the players". The more the game goes, the more you see how all the systems are just tailored to keep people playing. Not the "it's interesting things that keep people hooked" but "infinite time sinks just because otherwise players would burn through content".

The issue is that this mentality is a dinosaur at best. Long gone are the games that keep people playing constantly for years. The design shouldn't revolve about having daily tasks to do otherwise you fall back, because while it's an extremely powerful drive, it just makes most people annoyed by the fact that no matter what they do they're not gonna be on par of others (whatever is your "category" of player). Reason why most people just come in, check the expansion, se that actually nothing changed from 6 years ago or more and stop playing. The others are the ones mostly obsessed with ladders and rankings because they need something that tells them they're not wasting their time for nothing.

Beware: i don't hate SL. I actually like it a lot so far and plan to play it over and over. But Blizzard should just stop designing the game around bringing players to pay a sub until next patch hits. They should just make good stuff and let players come and go, because that's what they're doing anyway. Make a good content patch that lasts 2 months for the fast people, and then let them go, and make the following patch even better so people come back.

Their focus on keeping people paying the sub is what is killing the game. It's not content drought, it's just making it as slow as possible before gamers get tired so they can rake more money from subs/bots/game time while delivering the same amount of updates, or even less if possible. All the free developer time they can get is developer time that can be invested in something else that nets them additional/more money.

Dead on. They spend way too much time trying to create new systems to keep you busy, when the reality is people want to see story, run some dungeons, do some raids, hop into a bit of PvP and maybe kill a bit of time on things like pet battles and transmog runs. The play systems in this game were worked out mostly in 2004, how they worked needed some changes but what drove people to play has always been there, otherwise the game never would have grown.

All of these busy body systems just need to go. Yes MMO's have always embraced grinds, you do need something that takes some time, but artificial limiters like you see with the Maw where you can't even go an do the content even if you wanted to have just gotten silly.

[Wangming]

Didn't bother reading all 13 pages, so maybe i'm gonna say something other people has said already.

I think WoW is still good, but has terrible management team behind - especially the ones that decide what's "good for the game and the players". The more the game goes, the more you see how all the systems are just tailored to keep people playing. Not the "it's interesting things that keep people hooked" but "infinite time sinks just because otherwise players would burn through content".

.

Yes, thank you. Shit is there to waste your time. Even small things like vendor trash. They sell for fuck all so they are only used to clog your inventory. And you have to loot them because god forbid you skin a deer without taking everying from its stomach. After that, time to get home. Why not use the flight path cause instant travel is a big no? Also good luck going from one zone to another. You'll have an extra detour thanks to our pocket dimension. But even if that weren't the case you still can't fly from EK to Kalimdor for example. That would be crazy. Now go back and loot bear paws. Every bear only draws one paw or zero. Doesn't matter they have four legs. You destroyed them all, okay? Get me 20 of those. And be sure to kill wild bears. Angry wild bears won't ever drop the paws I need. Go on, shoo!

[Nyel]

Change expansion structure but not what you propose. Wow needs MUCH more frequent patches to justify the sub price to many of us.

Legion style.

I have no idea why Legion was planned and laid out so perfectly, but everything just worked. Every 77 days a new update, every 154 days a big content patch.

Maybe BfA wasn’t bad enough that they invest so much time, resources and passion they did after WoD, but now it’s obvious that they should have and the game was in dire need of it. Instead we got BfA 2.0 / Legion 3.0 that turned everything fun into busy work.

[Yriel]

I think you're throwing two different mindsets into the same pot.

What i'm referring to is the concept that some players reject the concept of improving themselves on a general basis, such as the Cata heroics, when they failed in there because whatever reasons, some people didn't see this as an incentive to improve themselves, but started to boycott the content.

What you seem to referring to is the concept that some players engage in content despite not liking it for rewards.
To which i can give you a simple explanation: Because it progresses their character and character progression is fun to a lot of people and frankly the core of pillar of this game.

No we mean the same thing.
There are a lot of different people who play wow for different reasons. After a long day at work i, for example, just want to relax and play something for fun. I don't want to play very difficult dungeons at this point in my life, i have no desire to proof myself to the wow community, i just want to have fun. If WoW doesn't provide that, i play something else.
I understand that there are a lot of younger competative people playing and it's great that they have hard content but i don't have the desire to "better myself" in wow, it's not that a can't do hard dungeons, it's just not fun for me. And i don't play stuff that's not fun.

So it's not players refusing to improve themselves, it's players that don't want to do content they don't enjoy. You can bribe them with loot up to a certain point but thats it.
And i'm pretty sure that Blizz will shoot themselves in the foot with the SL iteration of M+ dungeons, too, for the same reasons as back then in Cata.

[Wangming]

Legion style.

I have no idea why Legion was planned and laid out so perfectly, but everything just worked. Every 77 days a new update, every 154 days a big content patch.

Maybe BfA wasn’t bad enough that they invest so much time, resources and passion they did after WoD, but now it’s obvious that they should have and the game was in dire need of it. Instead we got BfA 2.0 / Legion 3.0 that turned everything fun into busy work.

See, this is the problem. Part of the, treating customers like dirt. Apparently a good expansion is just an apology after a massive fuckup, instead of being, you know, the default option. If you don't want to invest time, money and effort into a game, to make it your passion project, don't make games.

[Coldkil]

Legion style.

I have no idea why Legion was planned and laid out so perfectly, but everything just worked. Every 77 days a new update, every 154 days a big content patch.

Maybe BfA wasn’t bad enough that they invest so much time, resources and passion they did after WoD, but now it’s obvious that they should have and the game was in dire need of it. Instead we got BfA 2.0 / Legion 3.0 that turned everything fun into busy work.

Legion is more an outlier than anything. Most of the D3 team was moved into WoW and they had a huge development increase on the project. Plus you can see how all the major D3 systems ended being implemented in WoW (which i don't really think is a totally good thing - some drawbacks are really damaging the game imho).

Anyway, look at stuff like Torghast. It could have been a nice intermission between the usual farming stuff - instead it turned out to be the "mandatory grind" that no one likes because at first it was just tedious and time consuming for next to zero reward, so they ended nerfing the shit out of it otherwise player progression would just have been arbitrarily hindered. Corridors are something i didn't expect - optional, yes, but just a dragged as hell version of the normal 6 floors. It's not even a matter of difficulty; some classes have powers so string it's a cakewalk, and naturally over time with gear it becomes something you do once and the forget about.

[McLøvin]

When it comes to PVP They need to do a HUGE overhaul of how some classes work.
Ret Pally, Boomkin, Rogues, and Warriors are way too over tuned right now.

[Tikishock]

Well it isn't wrong

SOoo anyway a TL;DR of the professions: You know how you can have all the classes in one character and just switch by swapping main hand weapons?

Well the same is true for professions. They have their gear, stats that benefit them and skills. For gathering your skills help with getting HQ items, increase the gathering chance of rare materials or increase the number of materials you gather. For crafting you can inrease the chance of creating HQ versions of anything you make. Also for fishing what you catch can be placed in the aquarium in your house. Also you have ocean fishing which is basically PvE group content for fishers.

Also each guild (order hall) for profession has its own storyline with quests, cutscenes everything. There are other systems that support professions like certain beast tribes (reputation factions) but my fav has to be treasure hunts. While gathering you can randomly find treasure maps. You can decipher those and if you can find out where they point to on the map, you can go there for a treasure chest. It is recommended to bring friends, cause opening the chest will spawn a bunch of monsters. If you can kill them, you can loot the chest. BUT. Here is the fun part. There is a chance for the chest to open up a portal to a special dungeon which you can explore and kills bosses for tons of gold, valuable crafting materials and exclusive minions (pets). Kinda like the portals treasure goblins leave behind in Diablo III. I think there are two possible dungeons you can enter. Maybe three.

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Easier said than done. WoW isn't just a game. It is ingrained into pop culture. Like Star Wars. I mean we had 3 good movies. 4 if you include Rogue One. But the prequels are only good for memes, and the rest, not even for that. But you will never kill Star Wars. Pulp Fiction, Shawshan Redemption, Fight Club, the Matrix, Parasite....we had tons of better movies. Hell the original Kurosawa ones it ripped off were better movies. But Star Wars will never die.

Things like WoW, Star Wars or Harry Potter aren't removed by better things. They were there to do the right thing at the right time and now they are inseperable from culture.

Star Wars had an MMO and obviously it wasn't near as good as WoW so it failed. I'm not saying WoW would ever completely disappear but honestly if there were better games out there that offered what WoW did--people would play them. I know I would check it out. But as far as games providing a robust, large multiplayer raid environment--nobody even comes close to WoW right now. Nor did they ever.

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The reason there hasn't been a legit WoW killer, is because it's super expensive to create and extremely risky.

No game company wants to invest the mega million$, and years of development time, for a game that may or may not connect with players, and be a success or flop. I don't think investors want to take on that risk anymore.

It takes years to create a brand new MMORPG, and a shit ton of money. All for the huge risk of it possibly tanking, or not.

If WoW was over and done with after Shadowlands 9.3, there wouldn't be a WoW killer, or a new WoW type game come out, maybe some game would come and go, but doubtful there'd be a new game out that could charge $15 a month and have millions of subs month in month out.

There have been plenty of wannabe WoW killers/MMOs over the past 16 years and they all failed. I'm not a Blizzard or WoW apologist--I'm just sick of people shitting on this game because it's currently in vogue to shit on popular games. If this game truly was shit--nobody would play it and another MMO over the past 16 years would have been successful. That's all I'm saying.

Wildstar - Fail
Star Wars - Fail
Final Fantasy - Success? Never played it--doesn't seem as popular as WoW though.
Age of Conan - fail
Warhammer Online - fail
Lord of the Rings - fail
Guild Wars - same as Final Fantasy probably
Elder Scrolls Online - Guild Wars/Final Fantasy territory probably?
Tabula Rasa - fail

Most of these games crashed and burned because they just couldn't keep up with WoW in terms of content and quality. Haters gonna hate but facts are facts. WoW is and was the best MMO experience out on the market. It is never as bad as people say it is.

[Stardrift]

This is not the case.

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Well, wishful thinking is a kind of thinking.

It is the case lmao

I don't know many who enjoyed it. Surveys all over this site and others declare BFA to be the worst expansion thus far. Ofc there will be a few that enjoyed it, but overall it is universally disliked by the majority.

[noctim2]

My wishes for 9.1

- Useful WQ-Character-Itemization
- Animapower-Boost after collecting a certain amount (collect 3 x times as much after three days of anima-grinding)
- Ability pruning (I literally don't have enough buttons on my mouse/keyboard)
- Torghast duration nerf (not easier - only shorter)
- Maw riding
- More flight points

But these are only the actually fixable things. In contrast, there are deeper and more structural problems.

Shadowlands feels small, disconnected and sterile. While the zones, especially revendreth, are visually appealing, most of them lack really memorable characters, quests and hubs with unique stories and flavors. Also the WarCraft feeling is not really present in Shadowlands. There literally aren't any horde or alliance questlines, because, by plot, we are alone in the shadowlands, alongside with a hand full of crossover heroes (Thrall, Jaina, Baine & Co.).

The MAIN storyline completely runs off-screen with the Jailer, Anduin and Sylvanas. Only a few enigmatic cutscenes remind us, that there is "some sort" of threat lurking somewhere. Too much is left untold and waiting for the big patches makes the first phase of the expansion quite dull and random.

Ironically, there actually IS a lot of (minor) storytelling, but we are degraded to a more or less passive observer. We kind of help "our" covenant, but at the same time, we only experience one fourth of the major storyline. Yes, you CAN switch covenants, but with major annoyances regarding grinding and playtime.

there are also many places in the expansion that were obviously built to be as annoying and inconvenient as possible. I'm talking about the few and unfavorably located flight points, the ban on riding in the maw, Oribos and the covenant halls, the literally endless corridors in Torghast, the cumbersome outdoor design with the longest possible detours, the minimal loot yield and so on.

And I don't see any easy solutions to these problems

[Kralljin]

No we mean the same thing.

They're not.
People not willing to improve themselves is not the same as people complaining about receiving upgrades from content they don't enjoy.

[Wangming]

Star Wars had an MMO and obviously it wasn't near as good as WoW so it failed. I'm not saying WoW would ever completely disappear but honestly if there were better games out there that offered what WoW did--people would play them. I know I would check it out. But as far as games providing a robust, large multiplayer raid environment--nobody even comes close to WoW right now. Nor did they ever.

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There have been plenty of wannabe WoW killers/MMOs over the past 16 years and they all failed. I'm not a Blizzard or WoW apologist--I'm just sick of people shitting on this game because it's currently in vogue to shit on popular games. If this game truly was shit--nobody would play it and another MMO over the past 16 years would have been successful. That's all I'm saying.

Wildstar - Fail
Star Wars - Fail
Final Fantasy - Success? Never played it--doesn't seem as popular as WoW though.
Age of Conan - fail
Warhammer Online - fail
Lord of the Rings - fail
Guild Wars - same as Final Fantasy probably
Elder Scrolls Online - Guild Wars/Final Fantasy territory probably?
Tabula Rasa - fail

Most of these games crashed and burned because they just couldn't keep up with WoW in terms of content and quality. Haters gonna hate but facts are facts. WoW is and was the best MMO experience out on the market. It is never as bad as people say it is.

SWTOR had/has very little content so even the Star Wars brand can't carry it far. I mean it never got a new class since release. The only reason people still play it is because Star Wars. It doesn't even have the personal stories anymore.

As for your breakdown? It is pretty funny. The big ones (aka the ones that can carry a healthy playerbase with WoW around) are considered to be Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2, Elder Scrolls Online and Black Desert Online. Funny how you never played any of them. Of course if you did play all the ones you labeled fail, you still get points for branching out, but it is hard to gauge the MMO market if you haven't tried all the prominent ones.

[CaptainV]

This is not the case.

It really was universally disliked, the figures show its considered The worst expansion so far with the fact they had to remove warforged/titanforged only to replace it with corrupted weapons that broke the pvp balance, the fact that the entire premise went wrong immediatley, the story, the warfronts and islands being non content azerite being even worse than artifact power.

Yeah it was universally hated, I dont think anyone really "Liked" any of this and I mean *Liked* as in heavily enjoyed/worshipped this kinda content because if they did, I have no idea what to say to em except, im impressed?

[Gourbaak]

It really was universally disliked, the figures show its considered The worst expansion so far with the fact they had to remove warforged/titanforged only to replace it with corrupted weapons that broke the pvp balance, the fact that the entire premise went wrong immediatley, the story, the warfronts and islands being non content azerite being even worse than artifact power.

Yeah it was universally hated, I dont think anyone really "Liked" any of this and I mean *Liked* as in heavily enjoyed/worshipped this kinda content because if they did, I have no idea what to say to em except, im impressed?

No it was not universally hated. A very loud minority hated it, but a lot of people enjoyed it. Most of them weren't on forums trying to impose their point of view though

[OMGTwitchTV]

Considering even 6.2 might release by the time we see 9.1 on live, this is a moot point, don't you think?

Curious question: Are you always this hyperbolic, or is this some new love/hate for WoW we've not yet experienced? It's a content patch, and we literally just got .05 a few weeks ago. If 9.1 is a whole 4-6 weeks away, whoopty-fuckin-doo. Find something else to do in the meantime besides perfecting the art of overly dramatic commentary.

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It isn't a "WoW is dying" thread, by any means. WoW may not be in the best spot atm, but it's still going on and doesn't need you defending it.

Subjective.

So pointing at the patch schedules, or comparing content from Legion/BfA to SL's is being "entitled". Give me a break m8.

Every complaint thread on this site reaks of entitlement. "Damnit Blizz, you are taking 2 days longer than you said you would! GG losers!". Not for nothing, but they are doing pretty well given the state of the world for the past 14 months thanks to a certain virus. Maybe... just maybe... people can remember we are ALL just human, much like the content team at Blizz, and that during this particular time in history, things might take a wee bit longer than anticipated. Also, everything is subjective "m8", so feel free to give ME that break.

[Nyel]

Curious question: Are you always this hyperbolic, or is this some new love/hate for WoW we've not yet experienced? It's a content patch, and we literally just got .05 a few weeks ago. If 9.1 is a whole 4-6 weeks away, whoopty-fuckin-doo. Find something else to do in the meantime besides perfecting the art of overly dramatic commentary.

The thing is, 9.0.5 didn’t bring anything to the game besides hotfixes and Valor Points (which should have been here at launch but wasn’t planned at all, that’s why Blizzard came up with them within two months). 9.1 in the best case scenario is 8 weeks away. Best case means PTS is dropping today. It’s more likely that it’s 10 or more weeks away.

By the time 9.1 is live we already had 7.2 in Legion (without access to Tomb of Sargeras) or 6.2 in WoD. This is pretty telling. In BfA we would be just a few weeks before 8.2. This is not hating or over dramatic commentary, it’s discussing facts.

[OMGTwitchTV]

The thing is, 9.0.5 didn’t bring anything to the game besides hotfixes and Valor Points (which should have been here at launch but wasn’t planned at all, that’s why Blizzard came up with them within two months). 9.1 in the best case scenario is 8 weeks away. Best case means PTS is dropping today. It’s more likely that it’s 10 or more weeks away.

By the time 9.1 is live we already had 7.2 in Legion (without access to Tomb of Sargeras) or 6.2 in WoD. This is pretty telling. In BfA we would be just a few weeks before 8.2. This is not hating or over dramatic commentary, it’s discussing facts.

And when you push patches out every 3 months and only have 3 patches, you end up with 12-15 months of content drought at the "end" of an expansion. Most people have probably forgotten the year it took to see something new after the prior expac ran its course super fast. If nothing else, a content release every 5 months guarantees we get new content within the first 20 months of a 24 month expac, and while we might have to wait a bit longer between X.1, X.2, and X.3, we don't have to sit on our hands for a year or more waiting for the next X.0 or X.02. I know logic has no place here and common sense is not so common, but if more people understood the accidental byproduct of a pandemic slowing content release, they would also see the other byproduct of how the end of the expac's drought is drastically reduced compared to previous expacs.

[Wangming]

Curious question: Are you always this hyperbolic, or is this some new love/hate for WoW we've not yet experienced? It's a content patch, and we literally just got .05 a few weeks ago. If 9.1 is a whole 4-6 weeks away, whoopty-fuckin-doo. Find something else to do in the meantime besides perfecting the art of overly dramatic commentary.

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Every complaint thread on this site reaks of entitlement. "Damnit Blizz, you are taking 2 days longer than you said you would! GG losers!". Not for nothing, but they are doing pretty well given the state of the world for the past 14 months thanks to a certain virus. Maybe... just maybe... people can remember we are ALL just human, much like the content team at Blizz, and that during this particular time in history, things might take a wee bit longer than anticipated. Also, everything is subjective "m8", so feel free to give ME that break.

First off, I enjoy commenting on this shitshow. Second, if you think I am overly dramatic now, you really don't know what I am capable of. And third, you can't say they are doing well, because you, and we, have no idea how they are doing. Sometimes they fart out a controversial change that not even Taliesen can defend, but otherwise there is total radio silence. They don't communicate with players because they don't care about them. And because they take them and their money for granted.

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I know logic has no place here and common sense is not so common, but if more people understood the accidental byproduct of a pandemic slowing content release, they would also see the other byproduct of how the end of the expac's drought is drastically reduced compared to previous expacs.

You do know that's not what getting back on schedule means, right? The expansion won't come out way sooner and the last raid tier won't magically be five months long. At best we will get back to six months between raid tiers and 10 months after the final raid tier (you know, the average. If you really think this will make the drought smaller, you really have no concept of what a delay is.