When did WoW convince itself Raiding is the only thing that's important?

[Miffinat0r]

You are the only one convinced by this. And your fanatism on this subject is honestly not healthy anymore.

Not sure if you read the same thread but I don't think I'm the only one who thinks this. FYI.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Mage Tower was great.

Islands, Warfronts, Torghast... these are all awful systems that don't provide interesting progression and were constructed as chores rather than as fun content.

unfortunately that’s kinda how trying to make content outside of raids(and to a lesser extent dungeons) relevant always plays out.

The mop scenarios are a perfect example blizzard made a bunch of them for people to have fun with friends and get some story tid bits and next to no one did them. So they then made heroics scenarios that gave valor so you could upgrade your raid gear and they became a chore people complained about instead.

Pet battles and mage tower might be the only content that’s ever avoided this problem.

World quests are much worse than the old daily quest system, because they insist on constructing the world quests as an overly managed system. I don't want to be directed to which world quests to do today. I want to be given hubs with interconnected quests that provide an experience to play through, not told "Here's your random shit to do today".

as some one who had done every daily rep to exalted multiple times gotta hard disagree. Doing the same quest (in mop mabye 3 batch’s of different quest) every day got old super fast and the world quest having a lot more variation is just better in pretty much every way rather your doing all the quest available to maximize rep or are just doing the chest for slower but steady progress.

[Elbob]

Casual and challenge are not counters to each other. This is a myth. Casual is simply a reflection of time commitment. You can have challenging content that doesn't require significant time commitment. That's casual challenge.

Whats the time limit on being a casual? Because I know the raid leader of a 1night a week mythic guild currently working on sylv. Does this mean mythic raiding can be casual? If so sounds like casuals have the same challenging content as anyone else, especially knowing M+ is not a major time commitment nor is doing a few stray rbgs.

[Lmaop]

unfortunately that’s kinda how trying to make content outside of raids(and to a lesser extent dungeons) relevant always plays out.

The mop scenarios are a perfect example blizzard made a bunch of them for people to have fun with friends and get some story tid bits and next to no one did them. So they then made heroics scenarios that gave valor so you could upgrade your raid gear and they became a chore people complained about instead.

This is a blizzard engineered issue for 17 years tho.

If you look at every wow expansion the thing that you spend the time the most is gearing. Doesnt matter if its tbc or BFA, sure, the absolute time is different, but proportionaly, the most time people spend on average in an expansion is getting gear.

I know people here dont like streamers but someone like toweliee is 100% i imagine the average player to be, only interested in power progression and some cool mounts and will not never touch anything else because thats how he was trained and raised by this game. A literal case of wow brain

[Lorgar Aurelian]

I don't think there's any actual reason to do Islands, Warfronts, or Torg for anything tbh. What's the point? Collectables?

What I don't get is why isn't the highest pinnacle of any of the big 3 just cosmetics? Seems to me to be the answer. You're doing that content because you find it fun. The rewards are neat but the prestige and the cosmetics are why you do things. Kinda seems counter-intuitive to me.

For the most part warfronts and islands were just about cosmetics.

Warfronts gave gear but once raids/mythic + opened better gear was easy to get so people rain then for the elite sets for transmog.

Islands of course got more play because of azerite but other then the weekly people would run then for all the cosmetics and even try doing then different ways to figure out how items were determined before the tokens were added.

[Eli85]

Whats the time limit on being a casual? Because I know the raid leader of a 1night a week mythic guild currently working on sylv. Does this mean mythic raiding can be casual? If so sounds like casuals have the same challenging content as anyone else, especially knowing M+ is not a major time commitment nor is doing a few stray rbgs.

Everyone is going to have a different time limit on being casual. Personally speaking, if you're setting off a 3 hour block, even if it's only 1 night a week, you are no longer casual.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

This is a blizzard engineered issue for 17 years tho.

If you look at every wow expansion the thing that you spend the time the most is gearing. Doesnt matter if its tbc or BFA, sure, the absolute time is different, but proportionaly, the most time people spend on average in an expansion is getting gear.

I know people here dont like streamers but someone like toweliee is 100% i imagine the average player to be, only interested in power progression and some cool mounts and will not never touch anything else because thats how he was trained and raised by this game. A literal case of wow brain

Pretty much ya, wow since classic has conditioned people to just focus on gear progress and Mabye the odd cool mount.

so when blizzard makes content just to be fun with no ties to progress people don’t do it for the most part.

[Lmaop]

Whats the time limit on being a casual? Because I know the raid leader of a 1night a week mythic guild currently working on sylv. Does this mean mythic raiding can be casual? If so sounds like casuals have the same challenging content as anyone else, especially knowing M+ is not a major time commitment nor is doing a few stray rbgs.

It has nothing to do with time, it was just felplague was equating falsely that "hard and "casual" dont mix because she/he doesnt know what that word mean saying they are "contradictory" or something.
Most people that are good at this game have actual reallife jobs family and not even streamers
Maybe just projecting i don't know. Obviously what casuals means in relation to time investment is gonna differ from person to person.

- - - Updated - - -

Pretty much ya, wow since classic has conditioned people to just focus on gear progress and Mabye the odd cool mount.

so when blizzard makes content just to be fun with no ties to progress people don’t do it for the most part.

Pretty much ye.

And the problem is i dont know if they want or can change it at this point because that would mean a patch with almost no power progression or even a cut raid tier to set a new tone. However, regardless if that would be good or bad for the game, you can imagine how the playerbase would react.

Its like self-fulfilling prophecy at this point i think they cant break out. And if thats the case i think they should embrace that wow will be always the gear/raid game and try to polish that content and maybe diversify with more 5man content and a cool new method to gear. This seems like a valid path forward to the game

[NineSpine]

unfortunately that’s kinda how trying to make content outside of raids(and to a lesser extent dungeons) relevant always plays out.

No, that's how making content outside of raids plays out *in wow for the last 8-10 years*. Other games don't have this problem, and wow didn't really used to have this problem. Other games have piles of non-raid content that is evergreen and great and often the best parts of the game.

The mop scenarios are a perfect example blizzard made a bunch of them for people to have fun with friends and get some story tid bits and next to no one did them. So they then made heroics scenarios that gave valor so you could upgrade your raid gear and they became a chore people complained about instead.

Pet battles and mage tower might be the only content that’s ever avoided this problem.

as some one who had done every daily rep to exalted multiple times gotta hard disagree. Doing the same quest (in mop mabye 3 batch’s of different quest) every day got old super fast and the world quest having a lot more variation is just better in pretty much every way rather your doing all the quest available to maximize rep or are just doing the chest for slower but steady progress.

Old quest hubs had related quests that you could do all at once. There were areas made for this content, there was a story to be told through them, and it existed as an interrelated slice of content. World quests don't have any of that. They are randomly placed activities that have no connection to each other and you just zip between them in whatever zone Blizzard has decided you should do today. There is no coherency, no story, no guided experience that goes along with them. There is also no real choice. I can't say "I really want to spend my time on X rep first". Blizzard tells you every day which rep you can get the big reward for that day.

You are confusing the volume of content with the system that delivers the content. If you put the volume of world quests we have now into the old system, you could rotate them and prevent the repetition and stagnation.

- - - Updated - - -

Blizzard always believed that and that's why its a dogshit company tbh. They cant design a game to save their lives, literary, as the past year showed us

Here is the reality, the majority of this playerbase doesn't do organized raids. This was already a widely known thing you could interfere with from the API but WoD printed it out in black and white.

Meanwhile, in the non-current year 2021, where the game shited itself, ion did give interviews and talks half of the interview time about mythic raid comp balance. It doesnt take asmongold or anyone else to see they lost the plot.
One of the major reasons why they removed master loot was because of, i quote, "high-end guilds doing too many funnel split runs". 40 E-celebs literally occupy headspace in the lead gamedesigners head which features should be in the game or not

This right here.

Any Q and A shows you the problem. Look at what issues and questions they choose to focus on. It's usually overwhelmingly about high end content that very few people do.

[infinitemeridian]

It's not that the game doesn't have things to do that aren't raiding. It's that raiding is one of the only few bits of content in this game that is fun for fun's sake, that receives any sort of love and care, that the developers seem to know what they're doing. It's also that they only care about player power content. So m+ and pvp to some extent receive the same attention (albeit not as much).

Yes, we have zones like Korthia and Nazjatar for open world content. Yes, we have events like timewalking and brawls. Yes we have Torghast. But can you say those are "good" content? No, I don't think that you can. World content is mindless, uninteresting and uninspired kill x collect y crap. Brawls and timewalking are either braindead or not available enough. None of the above is designed to be fun. It is designed to be a chore you need to do to get some power, so that you can get funneled into the "real" content that game has, which is instanced pve.

The only things that seem like they got any sort of passion behind them put into the game are:

-Mage Tower
-Visions
-Brawler's guild
-Suramar questing
-Mega dungeons

Not to mention that, as was mentioned above, half the interviews or blogs they do are about "balance" and "tuning" and things that really only pertain to raiding. The devs clearly only care about that, and everything is just slop fed to us "hogs" to keep whales subscribed (oh boy, 45 "new" mounts to collect in Korthia).

Player power content is what needs to take a backseat. Let's get more stuff that allows for players to create new ways to play for themselves (like Transmog did). Housing, better world content / pvp, more interesting small group / solo challenges, mount customization / combat, more inspired ways to customize how our characters look (better and more varied transmog sets and more of them, idle poses, race customization, etc.).

[Lorgar Aurelian]

Pretty much ye.

And the problem is i dont know if they want or can change it at this point because that would mean a patch with almost no power progression or even a cut raid tier to set a new tone. However, regardless if that would be good or bad for the game, you can imagine how the playerbase would react.

Its like self-fulfilling prophecy at this point i think they cant break out. And if thats the case i think they should embrace that wow will be always the gear/raid game and try to polish that content and maybe diversify with more 5man content and a cool new method to gear. This seems like a valid path forward to the game

Honestly they need to either add content for fun with no power and keep ideating on it for the small group that actually do it or as you said they just need to give up and focus more on things like dungeons.

The former option is likely hard to justify given that both from the businesses end and the player base end they would get a lot of guff for it being a waste of resources and how little people do said content but I’d say it’s likely the better option in the long term but they might be to scared to try at this point.

[NineSpine]

Honestly they need to either add content for fun with no power and keep ideating on it for the small group that actually do it or as you said they just need to give up and focus more on things like dungeons.

The former option is likely hard to justify given that both from the businesses end and the posher base end they would get a lot of guff for it being a waste of resources and now little people do said content but I’d say it’s likely the better option in the king term but they might be ti scared to try at this point.

It would be a lot easier to justify content if they dropped this asinine philosophy of deprecating all of the content every few months.

[Lmaop]

Honestly they need to either add content for fun with no power and keep ideating on it for the small group that actually do it or as you said they just need to give up and focus more on things like dungeons.

The former option is likely hard to justify given that both from the businesses end and the posher base end they would get a lot of guff for it being a waste of resources and now little people do said content but I’d say it’s likely the better option in the king term but they might be ti scared to try at this point.

The problem is also with the recent scandal and the whole "community council" thing they put them under the thumbs of the masses more than ever. So like you said, the option where they try to diversify with more fun content with no power progression will probably be shot down immediately in the try out period

But yeah i wholeheartedly agree with you those are the paths that the games need to take to flourish. Im gonna play 10.0 regardless, i have friends in this game and still get alof enjoyment from it even if i dont like the company behind it and not every decision. But obviously, its gonna be an interesting xpac, to say the least. Good talk

[OrangeJuice]

Basically ever since that piece of shit known as Ion took over.

[MartiniSaint]

This right here.

Any Q and A shows you the problem. Look at what issues and questions they choose to focus on. It's usually overwhelmingly about high end content that very few people do.

what? wow QnAs, as in the ones with Ion and Lore, suck ass, the questions are always absolutetly retarded, like 50 mins of mind-numbing questions and 10 minutes of relevant stuff

[Miffinat0r]

what? wow QnAs, as in the ones with Ion and Lore, suck ass, the questions are always absolutetly retarded, like 50 mins of mind-numbing questions and 10 minutes of relevant stuff

Well I remember the Preach interview--and while the conversation was pointless, there was a moment in the interview where you could see Ion have a face of relief once Preached moved on from talking about casual evergreen content into a Mythic Raid Debate. Literally you see Ion fumbling around during the interview and looking like he needs Preach to save him; and then Preach changed to Mythic Raiding and Ion was like SAVED!

I showed that to a few buddies who work in comms for politics and they had no idea what he was saying but all could pause the video at the exact moment and knew he went from talking about something he didn't to something he did.

[Elbob]

Everyone is going to have a different time limit on being casual. Personally speaking, if you're setting off a 3 hour block, even if it's only 1 night a week, you are no longer casual.

Yeah im gonna go ahead and stay away from linking scheduled time to the casual title, because of average joe who has a family and job only plays for 1 scheduled 3 hour block a week, when he has time to run a stray dungeon or 2 with his college buddies. I'd still call that casual.

I think casual v not is more about mindset. If your gameplay is based around getting better and pushing harder content you probably shouldn't label yourself casual. If your focus is more about having fun first and foremost I think you can slap the casual title on yourself. Now obviously fun and getting better can be very closely linked to the point in getting better and doing hard content is what you find fun. Now I wouldn't call myself casual even though I fall in that camp because I do push myself to do things I wouldn't find "fun" to help me achieve the end goal.

It has nothing to do with time, it was just felplague was equating falsely that "hard and "casual" dont mix because she/he doesnt know what that word mean saying they are "contradictory" or something.
Most people that are good at this game have actual reallife jobs family and not even streamers
Maybe just projecting i don't know. Obviously what casuals means in relation to time investment is gonna differ from person to person.

I mean yea, I don't think time is very relevant in someone being casual or not. But the poster I quoted straight up said "Casual is simply a reflection of time commitment." Which as a statement I pretty hard disagree with. I think some one can be a casual bloke that likes to troll trade chat and herb for 10+ hours a week and I think some one can do tryhard mythic raid prog for < 6.

In regards to what @FelPlague said, I don't fully agree with him about them being purely contradictory but "casual content" will have limited cross over with "hard content". Mage tower I think is an example of hard content that casuals can do. It no gearing, scheduling, or grouping requirement and you can have some good plain fun throwing attempts at it without stressing about doing better.

[Lorgar Aurelian]

No, that's how making content outside of raids plays out *in wow for the last 8-10 years*. Other games don't have this problem, and wow didn't really used to have this problem. Other games have piles of non-raid content that is evergreen and great and often the best parts of the game.

sure other games don’t have the same problem but those other games also haven’t conditioned there fan base since 2004 to be this way so people expect different things.

And the only reason it wasn’t an issue 10 or so years ago (pre mop) is because blizzard just didn’t have any content of the like back then and almost every time they have tried it’s ended the same way.

Old quest hubs had related quests that you could do all at once. There were areas made for this content, there was a story to be told through them, and it existed as an interrelated slice of content.

doing the same related quest every day wasn’t a positive it just made them all staler faster, mop kinda got around this by having multiple sets of quest that changed but it was still a drag after a while.

For the most part (outside of mop) they also didn’t have areas made for them or even a story they were just lvling quest repeated in the same lvling area. You could pretty much count the ones that did on one hand.

World quests don't have any of that. They are randomly placed activities that have no connection to each other

and they are better for it as you get to do more varied quest in more varied locations.

There is also no real choice. I can't say "I really want to spend my time on X rep first". Blizzard tells you every day which rep you can get the big reward for that day.

you can absolutely still pick where you really want to spend your time because outside the quest all world quest still give rep for each zone there in.

For example in BFA I really wanted dark iron dwarfs which were locked behind SI7 rep. So I ignored every rep in kul tras even if I had a chest for them and just did every single zandalari world quest as they al face the rep. My friends complained that I wasn’t doing base mythics with them or wasn’t getting azerite but I didn’t care I got my dark iron in like a week and a half.

You are confusing the volume of content with the system that delivers the content. If you put the volume of world quests we have now into the old system, you could rotate them and prevent the repetition and stagnation.

sure you could do that but they didn’t do all I can really compare is the version of each we got and when sound so world quest are just better to me.

[Lmaop]

I mean yea, I don't think time is very relevant in someone being casual or not. But the poster I quoted straight up said "Casual is simply a reflection of time commitment." Which as a statement I pretty hard disagree with. I think some one can be a casual bloke that likes to troll trade chat and herb for 10+ hours a week and I think some one can do tryhard mythic raid prog for < 6.

In regards to what @FelPlague said, I don't fully agree with him about them being purely contradictory but "casual content" will have limited cross over with "hard content". Mage tower I think is an example of hard content that casuals can do. It no gearing, scheduling, or grouping requirement and you can have some good plain fun throwing attempts at it without stressing about doing better.

yeah 100% agree

[Relapses]

Yeah, why on earth would a game that has existed for almost 2 decades with an extremely profitable business model that built an entire empire on one single feature continue to develop for that single feature?

Hmm.........