To all the Bellulars, Asmogolds, Preaches, QoL'ers and Fans that want to Design WOW.

[Osmeric]

I can tell. Maybe you should stick to FF14, the single player MMO.

Indeed. I wouldn't want to help fund the continued existence of WoW.

[florclorbromiod]

Indeed. I wouldn't want to help fund the continued existence of WoW.

Then I hope you'll throw out your PC and smartphone next considering they're made by children abused in a sweatshop.

[Soon-TM]

Then I hope you'll throw out your PC and smartphone next considering they're made by children abused in a sweatshop.

Whataboutism is so embarrassing to see in a grown up person

[Ethas]

I don't care about your quack game numbers made up by random websites. We have cold hard data right from Activision.



Blizzard had 29 MIL MAUs at Shadowlands launch ( biggest in history ) and 26 MIL MAUs during July 2021. Which means they lost 3 million tops from WoW.



Hilarious, because WoW 100% has bigger investments than FF14. FF14 plays like a game from 2010.

There's no MMO with smoother combat than WoW's. In FF14 you can't even move and do a melee attack at the same time properly.

Haha so much this. Despite the fact that we don’t like certain things in wow (mostly story-wise for me because I reject this whole Horde and Alliance are happy friends forever stupidity) it is the pinnacle of MMO genre. And also the most balanced on the market. No korean, japanese or chineese clones come close even to the long outdated WoW Classic.

I recently installed ff on a console and all I wanted was to vomit. The game looks just bad, plays bad, UI is terrible irrational mess. The art style is absent. The textures are like 144p video on youtube. Animations are that of the first grader in computer graphics class.

I know that the modern sheepy gaming audience is mostly influenced by twitch “stars” but playing something like this is just beyond me.

If WoW is dead, the MMO genre as a whole dies the same day.

[florclorbromiod]

Whataboutism is so embarrassing to see in a grown up person

What's embrarrassing is taking a moral stance when it's easy for you to do so, but ignoring those that require actual sacrifice. It's easy to quit WoW once it no longer interests you and claim it was because Blizzard is evil, while at the same time you give money to evil Chinese corporations whenever you buy yourself a new GPU.

But I guess googling logical fallacies to win an Internet argument is more important than having a backbone.

[Gadzooks]

So now you consider Karazhan casual content despite it being a raid?

It was more casual than the current raid tiers, when it came out. It was the first raid level content in WoW that could be pugged, and was, extensively. I know, I was at my peak in WoW playing during WOTLK.

WotLK literally didn't have any content outside of the raids.

Now this is some serious gaslighting. Wrath overall had a TON of things to do - they had I believe the most amount of questing ever in Wrath (and not many did all of it, like I did, to the final quests in Icecrown), there were reps to grind, like for the shoulder enchants, they'd made big changes to professions so they actually mattered, and could make PvP and higher end gear from it, Wintergrasp was a blast and I know I spent a lot of time in there, there were plenty of dungeons to run, LFG was out which made that a lot easier to do, and they had things like the Argent Tournament to grind out. Wrath had a substantial amount of content across the board, to claim otherwise is laughable. MOP might have had more overall, but Wrath was not lacking in anything. Not to mention the addiction of Death Knights, and substantial class reworks, and iconic raids.

I'd have to conclude you either weren't around in Wrath, or you're just gaslighting as hard as you can to win MMO-C points. Or something dumb like that.

[Garymorilix]

It was more casual than the current raid tiers, when it came out. It was the first raid level content in WoW that could be pugged, and was, extensively. I know, I was at my peak in WoW playing during WOTLK.



Now this is some serious gaslighting. Wrath overall had a TON of things to do - they had I believe the most amount of questing ever in Wrath (and not many did all of it, like I did, to the final quests in Icecrown), there were reps to grind, like for the shoulder enchants, they'd made big changes to professions so they actually mattered, and could make PvP and higher end gear from it, Wintergrasp was a blast and I know I spent a lot of time in there, there were plenty of dungeons to run, LFG was out which made that a lot easier to do, and they had things like the Argent Tournament to grind out. Wrath had a substantial amount of content across the board, to claim otherwise is laughable. MOP might have had more overall, but Wrath was not lacking in anything. Not to mention the addiction of Death Knights, and substantial class reworks, and iconic raids.

I'd have to conclude you either weren't around in Wrath, or you're just gaslighting as hard as you can to win MMO-C points. Or something dumb like that.

I have been thru this same conversation regarding Classic, Classic TBC and now we're talking WotLK.

I don't care what you think WotLK was like, you will see what WotLK actually was like when we have the Classic version.
And you will be sitting in Dalaran for the majority of it.

[Soon-TM]

What's embrarrassing is taking a moral stance when it's easy for you to do so, but ignoring those that require actual sacrifice. It's easy to quit WoW once it no longer interests you and claim it was because Blizzard is evil, while at the same time you give money to evil Chinese corporations whenever you buy yourself a new GPU.

But I guess googling logical fallacies to win an Internet argument is more important than having a backbone.

Only a retard would need to google about whataboutism, especially when you provided such a textbook example.

But yeah, I suppose you're right, you can't criticise any injustice or abusive behaviour whatsoever, because someone, somewhere, will always have it worse. Great reasoning m8

[Garretdejiko]

I'm willing to bet my ISP speed's higher than yours.
The game just has spaghetti code.

And I'm willing to bet you just made a throwaway account just to shit on FF14.
To give credit where it's due, that "can't dps while running" meme is very original.

[Redshirtz]

Id rather have Homer design expansion features because it always gets abandoned..

[sam86]

Oh c'mon, this argument is just so damn disingenuous.

Subcount has been growing since Launch but started to plateau in Wotlk, disregarding the entire growth during TBC to just to changes made in Wotlk is plain dishonest.

Even Morhaime admitted that this constant increase of accessability has actually taken a toll on the game.

ignoring also that half of wow numbers in TBC was chineese who had zero access to wotlk means u don't understand a very important thing: wrath was pure eu/us, it is why while tbc has almost same numbers as wrath, it wasn't the talk of everyone during that time because half of those numbers don't speak english
then came china comical censorship and they flat out banned wrath, forcing some chineese players to play it illegal on other servers but still the vast majority were pure eu/us players, hence why wow exploded in popularity in wrath

or u didn't find it strange that the 12m tbc player didn't talk about wow as passionate as the 12m of wrath?

- - - Updated - - -

-snip-

need emotion facepalm
this study didn't talk about qualification, it may surprise u but a lead developer in corona vaccine was turkish for example, did his nationality matter? no he was a qualified researcher
blizz didn't talk about hiring who is qualified regardless of gender, they talked about they will focus on hiring based on gender, not qualification, if u find a black guy who is better artist than the white guy who wants to work, hire him, that simple, but that what i talk about here, they aren't going to hire who is better, they are going to hire who has trans-boobs or real boobs and who has black skin or orange or whatever even if they aren't qualified, that's the problem
want to actually improve ur work? make cv anonymous, just type ur qualities, and hire based on it, and i bet that 70% of them will be white because USA is 70% white

[crusadernero]

No, you are wrong.

It literally didn't matter what the actual content was back then at that point if your main argument is "bUt It hAd 12M peOplE".
Your friends and your friends' friends played WoW to be together. That was the point.
You didn't have 80 multiplayer online genres to choose from. You didn't have 35 launchers or 10 inter-connected social media sites to talk to people.
People simply gravitated to WoW as everyone was on it.

The argument that it has anything to do with gameplay is flawed.
There is always a group of gamers who focus on gameplay, but when we look at 12million people then no, the vast majority probably didn't even know what half their spells did.
Don't mix gameplay design with the social climate of THE TIME.
WoW wasn't a "farm 30000 mobs in the same area" MMO and it had good social features that kept people connected at a time where there were way less platforms to do so. Everything beyond that is irrelevant for the active player numbers argument.

When you tackle the actual argument of the thread, whether WoW has non-instanced causal content, the answer is objectively yes, more than EVER before.

So now you consider Karazhan casual content despite it being a raid?
Normal raiding is not harder now than Karazhan was. Why is that too elitist now? We even have LFR which you can AFK thru.

WotLK literally didn't have any content outside of the raids.
You could do a few dailies here and there for jack-shit and you could do Wintergrasp, which I consider a battleground anyway.
This against just shows how blinded you are by a big player number even tho it has zero correlation to implemented gameplay systems because it gives you a false equivalence that you can point at: "bIg NuMBer = GoOd".

Sure.

This is a very important part of it. I remember back in the day when wow initially launched. I remember the years that followed with BC & Wotlk. Especially in the early years it was such a huge deal being able to see eachother, talk with eachother and play a videogame online with eachother. Especially so seamlessly, smooth and easy. There were ofc online games, but nothing of the scale of wow.

As you said, there werent ALOT of good multiplayer options out there. There werent much of Social media platforms to go by that everyone flocked to as they do now. When I think of what young gamers of today have to pick and choose from and compare it to what me and my friends could pick and choose from when we were young, young gamers of today have so many games to pick. There werent many other games that did what wow did back then.

Makes you wonder though. Was it pristine gameplay or the players that made the MMORPG back then? I met so many people in those first years, so many friendships. Play wow today and you probably walk around solo 99% of the time.

When wow launched it was unique for many reasons, one of being a huge place for gamers to come together and play, chat and have some fun. In a huge virtual world. Things like that is a given in 2021, nothing special about it.

[Raelbo]

It's not exactly a secret that there was and still is a massive botting population in WoW. I also botted for a short time in MoP. So I got an eye for the details of the harder to spot bots.

You're trying to make an argument of authority. Except you're not an authority.

Big difference is that now with the WoW token, there's huge incentive to bot.

At face value this seems like an "obvious" statement to make. I mean the WoW token is worth real money, so people would have an incentive to try and acquire it via cheating. But if you actually start to apply a bit of critical thinking to it, then it doesn't really make that much sense. And let me be clear here: I am not trying to argue that people have no incentive to bot. Rather I am taking issue with your assertion that we have a huge incentive to bot.

I think it's fair to start out by claiming that the incentive to bot is dictated by the value the individual can get out by doing so. The word "huge" is a relative term, so I'll be contrasting the incentive to bot in order to acquire tokens against the incentive to bot in order to sell gold for cash.

The token may have monetary value, but you can't actually convert tokens into money. All you can do is use tokens to save yourself spending money. Now sure, when it is a given that you would have spent that money, then you could make the argument that "money saved is money earned". And while there is certainly a sizeable amount of stuff on the store that you could spend tokens on, the amount of stuff that you would have spent it on is far less. Pretty much the only thing that you can reasonably argue represents real value is the monthly sub. The rest is just fluff.

Now compare that to 3rd party goldsellers farming gold to sell for real money. Do I even need to lay out the argument for how much more value they are getting out?

Secondly, one should also look at disincentives.

Botting carries a risk of getting caught and losing your account. Now if you're farming for tokens, that means that tokens have value for you. And since the only things you can get with tokens are tied to playing Blizzard games, this implies that you value your Blizzard account. In other words, the value proposition attached to botting for gold to acquire for tokens is directly proportional to what you stand to lose.

In short, either you don't give a shit about WoW and your account, in which case you have no incentive to bot in the first place or, you care about your account which gives you an incentive to bot, but also gives a strong reason to not bot.

Now contrast this against a goldseller who has zero interest in the game or a WoW account. They are only there to rip as much money out of WoW players as possible.

Please explain again how exactly tokens give one a HUGE incentive to bot? They don't. At most it's a pretty weak incentive.

You claim that players don't want to risk old accounts, but guess what they do?

I made no such claim. I said that tokens offered a safe alternative to those who don't want to risk their accounts. And preceding that I even outright stated that some will take those risks. Seriously, your argumentation here is really, really poor.

Use burner accounts, or heck, many even DO use their main account because Blizzard does absolutely jack shit to ban botters. Every time they make a token ban wave of 100,000 bots, it's more like a shotgun than a targeted sniper. They seem to just randomly fire and hit a lot of innocent players in the process and seem to rarely get the actual bots. That and they haven't done one of their ban waves in a long time.

You're making a lot of unsubstantiated claims here with no reasoning or sources to back them up.

The funny part about the rest of your post is, you just scream "YOU HAVEN'T SUBSTANTIATED OR BACKED UP YOUR CLAIMS" when you yourself have made numerous nebulous claims that you provide absolutely no backup or context for. So same to you. Not worth my time if you're going to hand wave me away when I can just do the same to your uniformed and mostly naive claims.

Most of my arguments (against you) are simply taking the things you've claimed and showing the logical flaws/weaknesses/inaccuracies therein. But sure, if you think that some of my arguments are contingent on false assumptions/facts/assertions, feel free to point them out to me. I welcome any opportunity to improve my argument by recognising by correcting errors in my assumptions, reasoning and conclusions.

You're right, nobody is forced to take part in it. Which is why WoW is at an all time low in players and Blizzard is looking for schemes to monetize to keep the shareholders happy, rather than bring players back.

I am not sure how that follows - you'll have to elaborate.

But you are correct. Everyone is happy. The whale who buys tons of tokens gets lots of gold to buy carries through the hardest content in the game. The botter gets lots of Blizzard Buxxxxx for hearthstone card packs, and Bobby Kotick gets another yacht this month.

1) You have no backing for the notion that every token seller is a whale buying carries through hard content. From what I have seen, pretty much every claim made boosters on this question seems to refute this notion and that it's pretty rare that boosts are paid for by tokens. Please note, I am not trying to argue that I know the state of things, simply refuting your claim and demonstrating another viewpoint that is equally valid. At least in my case I am being honest where you are clearly not.
2) You have no backing for the notion that every token buyer is botter. Maybe some are, but, I see zero reason to believe that most are, and unless you can bring some evidence to back this notion, I am going to call you a liar for trying to sell as fact something that is pure speculation on your part.
3) You have no backing for the notion that all the proceeds of a token sale go into funding Bobby's bonus. Of course he gets a cut of it, but it would seem pretty logical that a portion of it goes back into the development budget. So again, unless you can bring some evidence to back your claim, I am going to call you a liar for trying to present a massively distorted version of reality as fact.

[crusadernero]

I have been thru this same conversation regarding Classic, Classic TBC and now we're talking WotLK.

I don't care what you think WotLK was like, you will see what WotLK actually was like when we have the Classic version.
And you will be sitting in Dalaran for the majority of it.

Sitting in major cities used to be a thing back in the day. Even when ppl went afk they didnt log out, just found the spot in a IF/SW/Dal and stayed there until they were back(Maybe from dinner).

Remember the days when people would hang out at the IF bridge? It was a big deal. THere people could see what new gear items people had gotten, maybe a new mount, a title. People would just chat and.. hang out.

It was a thing back then. Most likely not a intentional thing by Blizzard, but nontheless.

[Kralljin]

Now this is some serious gaslighting. Wrath overall had a TON of things to do - they had I believe the most amount of questing ever in Wrath (and not many did all of it, like I did, to the final quests in Icecrown)

TBC also has a lot of "endgame" quests in Netherstorm and Shadowmoon Valley, a lot of people however don't bother to do them once they're capped, because those zones, alongside Icecrown, are a pain for characters around 78-79 (or 68-69).

there were reps to grind, like for the shoulder enchants

Ah yes, the first Reputation grind that awards a universal power upgrade which is also daily capped.

I can only hope when Classic Wotlk launches, the Shoulder enchants are BoA right off the bat and you can also turn in Relic of Ulduar for Rep, so you can just buy your way to Exalted.

they'd made big changes to professions so they actually mattered

That is just incorrect.

Classic and TBC were the height of Professions, because you could actually craft gear in there that was powerful enough to stand up to raid equivalent gear.
It is actually a pretty relevant choice to roll certain professions on your character in TBC, if you don't roll a given profession, that has a serious impact on your BiS list for a lot of classes, because you lose access to a certain items.

In Wotlk, that goes out of the window, because professions can no longer craft extremely powerful items, the biggest perk of profession are stat perks that basically are just more powerful enchants.
Everybody will just be rolling Engineering because it offers the same numerical bonus + Rocket boots.

The craftable PvP gear was just laughable, it was a terrible set beyond the most basic entry level.

Look mate, Wrath isn't a terrible expansion, but unless you're into completionism, you'll be reaching the raidlogging stage even faster than in Classic or TBC, because you pretty don't need to do anything outside of Raids to get good gear.
Especially if you come out of Classic TBC with SWP gear, can just raidlog from day one, because Naxx is utterly laughable and due to split difficulty, you'll be showered in loot.

It was a thing back then. Most likely not a intentional thing by Blizzard, but nontheless.

I'm not sure how much credit you can give Blizzard (or rather, Wotlk for that matter) for players just hanging out and chatting.

People also did that in Classic.
Or TBC.
Or they could do it even now.

Like please, MMO's can seen as interactive chatrooms in a way.

ignoring also that half of wow numbers in TBC was chineese who had zero access to wotlk means u don't understand a very important thing: wrath was pure eu/us, it is why while tbc has almost same numbers as wrath, it wasn't the talk of everyone during that time because half of those numbers don't speak english

Okay... then why wasn't there a massive bump in subs when it launched in China in august 2010?

That was still Wrath, late Wrath, but still.
You'd expect if such a massive audience was entirely closed off from Wrath, you should see a huge bump when that audience finally gains access.
Especially since you attribute all those subs during Wotlk entirely to EU / US.

or u didn't find it strange that the 12m tbc player didn't talk about wow as passionate as the 12m of wrath?

I find this such a silly argument.
Like please "Some people are more passionate about X than Y, hence you can attribute all the success it had to Y!".

Then there's also the factor that a lot of people frankly started to play during Wrath, which quite usually gives them a bias towards that era, the terminology "Wrathbaby" doesn't come from nothing.

[crusadernero]

out of Classic TBC with SWP gear, can just raidlog from day one, because Naxx is utterly laughable and due to split difficulty, you'll be showered in loot.

I'm not sure how much credit you can give Blizzard (or rather, Wotlk for that matter) for players just hanging out and chatting.

People also did that in Classic.
Or TBC.
Or they could do it even now.

Like please, MMO's can seen as interactive chatrooms in a way.

Yeah, and? I've just said that 20 minutes ago in this thread. Back then wow was played for many reasons, one of them was how easy and seemlessly it was to just hang out in the game, chat and meet others. There werent many other platforms to do so. There is now and to be honest, people probably dont have time anymore to just hang out in a videogame, they do that in other virtual places. Today there has to be something to do, or else its a waste.

[Noxina]

Be careful what you wish for.


You're basically Homer in this episode.

To be honest, ActiBlizz is Homer in this situation. They listen to those who cries the loudest and try to make a game that fits them. See how that turned out? I'd have more faith in those content creators creating a game than ActiBlizz at this moment.

[Kralljin]

Back then wow was played for many reasons, one of them was how easy and seemlessly it was to just hang out in the game, chat and meet others.

The point is that the ability to chat and interact with each other isn't a feature that the WoW devs invented, it's frankly the bread and butter of an MMO.

Unless the devs specifically put mechanics in place to promote that behavior, it's like giving a car engineer credit for designing a machine that you can use to drive from point A to point B.
It's just reduntant because that's the very basis of the product.

[crusadernero]

The point is that the ability to chat and interact with each other isn't a feature that the WoW devs invented, it's frankly the bread and butter of an MMO.

Unless the devs specifically put mechanics in place to promote that behavior, it's like giving a car engineer credit for designing a machine that you can use to drive from point A to point B.
It's just reduntant because that's the very basis of the product.

I get your point, but at the same time I experience two vastly different MMORPGs when I play retail and classic(and now SoM). In retail, im out there alone most of the time. Its a much more instanced based or quick in-quick out kind of game. Sure, there are guilds/communities and all that, but the point still stands I think. In classic, I meet people everywhere. Group up with them, chat with people and so on. Im many ways, classic demands that of you in order to complete alot of content. In retail, you can just "lulz" through everything and obtain a whole lot without uttering a word.

Theres a difference there and maybe Blizzard never intented for it or thought much of it in classic or in retail, but theres certainly been a change in how people consume and approach the game.

[Kralljin]

Its a much more instanced based or quick in-quick out kind of game. Sure, there are guilds/communities and all that, but the point still stands I think. In classic, I meet people everywhere. Group up with them, chat with people and so on. Im many ways, classic demands that of you in order to complete alot of content. In retail, you can just "lulz" through everything and obtain a whole lot without uttering a word.

I respect that, but i'll point out that in the context of Wotlk...is this still holding up?

You point out how it's much more instanced based in Retail, how will that be in Wotlk?
People are just going to do dungeons, they're not going to go out in the world and do quests when they're capped, especially when the Dungeon Finder is in from the getgo, that entire social aspect you're talking about is just taking a massive hit.
People will be sitting in Dalaran, be AFK until their queue pops, rinse and repeat.

I fully see your point in regards to Classic, because that is built to promote social interaction at almost every angle, but i think when it comes to Wotlk, that social aspect already takes a hit.
And giving it credit for having a capital where players meet eachother...that's what i'm not going to do, because that is what literally every expansion did.

Wotlk just didn't add anything that further promoted that sort of behavior, but considering dungeon finder was added in Wotlk, it certainly damaged it.