WoW needs shorter but more meaningful patches

[CaptainV]

I will phrase something I said in another topic: Less is more.

Not every single patch needs a raid, not every single raid needs to be 14 bosses long.

Theres a reason that a game like FFXIV keeps most of its players, and WoW doesnt, and its content cycle.

There is a cycle in XIV that launches just enough content a patch to keep people doing it without it being gated by the conventions of a weekly time gate grind.

Instead, that kinda content, like beast tribes is entirley listed as optional, filler to pass the time to keep you entertained but never to demand your time.

No main content has ever been mandatory in XIV, no raids have ever been heavily tedious.

World content is hit and miss, the pvp definatley needs work, but one thing WoW needs that XIV nailed, is shorter patches.

If they had more story driven patches, we'd get more story and more focus on the story of each expansion, which allows us to get the core of our gripe off our shoulders, content.

Even if that content is largely just some filler plots between the bigger moments, its still something.

Part of the reason wow's story, raiding, and everything suffers, is clutter/bloat that has slowed it to a crawl.

In the ye old, you had 2-3 raids an expansion launch, now you have 1 with 4 tiers of scaling difficulty, all that have to be balanced around severely stiffening development.

1 raid tier is fine, or 2 at most, but not 4, 4 is too many and seriously slows the game down for anyone but raiders.

Thus, sure, ill conceed wow is an amazing game, if you like raiding.

It is not, if you dont, and there was a time, Classic to WOTLK it had some content outside of raiding, that could still be considered competetive with it, pvp, dungeons, story, tabard rep farms.

[crakerjack]

I’d quit WoW if they changed up their style and didn’t have a raid with a decent amount of bosses. The only reason I play WoW is for the raiding and is the only reason I started playing WoW in 2005.

[Big Thanks]

For as long as story driven content is a window of text like this:

I will never get immersed in the story of wow.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

while I would be in favor of smaller patches adding content without raids classic-warth really isn't a good example of content outside of raiding when it comes to patches. quest wise most patches added next to nothing or some daily's like TOC or sunwell. Dungeon wise we we got a bit better with 5 dungeons across the three. Pvp wise we got 1 Bg with isle of conquest. all of these also came with raid patch's.

really Mop would be the exan you would want to look to with things like 5.1 having just outdoor content and the brawelers guild or 5.3 being all outdoor content with a new bg to.


also to Nitpick, FFxiv likely doesn't keep there player base given the rise in accounts they post every few years its rather plausible that they have a rather high turn over rate which likely puts them at small growth or breaking even player base wise most of the time.

[Sondrelk]

How would this function in practice though? Would you add constant hotifxes for short questlines? Each one would have to be playtested en masse for bugs, leaving the major patches less time.

Besides, WoW has been adding that content outside raids steadily ever since the nadir during WoD with the peak of the raid or die mentality.

[VinceVega]

if raids in wow would be not needed and shorter i would quit immediatly.

If i would want what you say i go and play FF14... not wow

[Toybox]

Playing WoW for the story is like reading a visual novel for the exciting gameplay. I don't think there's anything they could do to improve that to the point where I'd be happy paying £120 per year for mini-story patches & a lot less raid content.

[Relapses]

Yes, I'm sure everybody else wishes that it was Legion again. Hey, does anybody like Legion here? Can we get a show of hands for "Legion is best expansion"?

[Draknalor186]

For as long as story driven content is a window of text like this:



I will never get immersed in the story of wow.

There are addons to fix that.

I have one where the quest text appear in dialogue boxes

[Queen of Hamsters]

*Sigh*

At this point I'mma just assume that people on here don't actually follow official reports on the game. There haven't been negative reports on WoW's performance since the start of BfA, so it seems that something they're doing is handling retention just fine, although I can't for the life of me imagine what as of right now. And that was before you people could blame Covid-19 for anything, just to clarify...

I'm sure FFXIV has its struggles too, despite the rose-shimmer spread by some, but if you want FFXIV, go play FFXIV.

If WoW was to improve, I'd want them to do so by taking lessons from the history of WoW, not the fantasies of fans of a wholly different title.

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There are addons to fix that.

I have one where the quest text appear in dialogue boxes

I have one where quest text shows up as the talking-head window. Really nice, actually!

[Lochton]

There are addons to fix that.

I have one where the quest text appear in dialogue boxes

Aye. I use the Immersion Addon, great little tool!

[Razion]

They tried doing faster content delivery before -- didn't last long. It worked initially, but in the long term they couldn't keep it up.

[Lochton]

They tried doing faster content delivery before -- didn't last long. It worked initially, but in the long term they couldn't keep it up.

Always felt that the faster the patches, the shorter the content felt. And the shorter the patches, the slower the expansion's story development felt. Guess that is why we get larger batches of the story still, instead of a questline here and there, a campaign here, but a raid another patch, etc.

[deenman]

Cherry picking a novelty quest in a game with millions of lines of text and tens of thousands of quests is peak MMO-Shampion

huh?thats how the quests are delivered for most of players lvling experince,yeah in sl its better because you can chose the expansion to play,but until now for over a decade every new player had to slog threw all those text quests until atleast mop and wod where they finnaly started adding more voice overs

[Ashleyxoxo]

FFXIV keeps most of its players, and WoW doesnt

And your source is?

[WowIsDead64]

...

What you don't understand, is that not all players are story driven. You essentially ask to turn game into TV series. I'm not sure, if I belong to majority or not. At least current majority, even if in fact it's just 10% of possible playerbase, seems to be character-power-driven. I'm casual player. I would prefer last-patch-of-xpack like patches, that are long, but don't have heavy time gating, so I have enough time to both be satisfied by pace of rewards and complete my business of all my alts.

[cparle87]

For as long as story driven content is a window of text like this:



I will never get immersed in the story of wow.

People have been getting immersed in stories by... gasp... reading for nearly six thousand years. Sounds like a you problem.

[Lochton]

People have been getting immersed in stories by... gasp... reading for nearly six thousand years. Sounds like a you problem.

Some people need more visual or audio aid to feel immersed in a developed story. Sadly, they are in need of the aid to feel the story.

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Theres a reason that a game like FFXIV keeps most of its players, and WoW doesnt, and its content cycle.

Well, we don't have numbers on any of the two games of their ups and downs.

I guess World of Warcraft would have new life if it had to die as FF did just to fix its mistakes.

[Azerate]

I mean what you're saying makes sounds on paper, but at the same time WoW has existed for 16 years and still retains healthy player base with its current patch cycle model, so maybe don't fix what aint broke?

I'm not a raid/dungeon centric player myself, even though I obviously do them every patch, but many people are and that's often their only thing they enjoy in the game. WoW is not FF14, hardly anyone I know plays WoW for the story. In the end, if you enjoy another game's way of doing things more, maybe play that game instead? I'm definitely a fan of expanding the focus of the game beyond just seasonal pve/pvp, but not at the cost of crippling them.

Theres a reason that a game like FFXIV keeps most of its players, and WoW doesnt, and its content cycle.

Not sure where you got that, but I'm fairly sure FFXIV is much more seasonal than you think. I vaguely recall an interview with someone from the FF14 team saying that most of their players just return for a content patch to play through the story and then just leave until the next patch is rolled in and that they think it's perfectly fine. For most of the casual players it's like that in all games probably. They play the new thing for a bit, unsub and do something else until new stuff gets released. Whether that is to play through a story (in ff) or to play the new raid/dungeon content (wow).

[Temp name]

People have been getting immersed in stories by... gasp... reading for nearly six thousand years. Sounds like a you problem.

There's a large difference between sitting down with a book to read, and sitting down at your computer to play video games, only to then have to read