What Happened to This Game?

[schwarzkopf]

Yea...bfa and sl made the game so much better.

Yep they did, a little at a time.

[Toppy]

Yep they did, a little at a time.

Elaborate.

[Echo of Soul]

I think you hit the nail on the head, Blizz is just plain stubborn.

They seem to be unable or unwilling to look to other games for inspiration, instead choosing to stay within the same old rigid boundaries. Without the ability to grow, change and do things differently the game in general just gets stale and old.

If it's not a completely original idea that they themselves came up with it'll be rejected and looked down on. It's pride in its worst possible form.

Which is pretty ironic because Blizzard used to be the best in the business at stealing good ideas from others and improving on them. Originality was never their strong suit, still isn't.

[schwarzkopf]

Elaborate.

Each expansion - they try things out, some work, some don't - they take the best and use that the next time, they discard stuff that doesn't.

Without the stepping stones, the game would be static.

[Relapses]

If it's not a completely original idea that they themselves came up with it'll be rejected and looked down on. It's pride in its worst possible form.

Which is pretty ironic because Blizzard used to be the best in the business at stealing good ideas from others and improving on them. Originality was never their strong suit, still isn't.

This point of view always makes me chuckle. It's as if ex-WoW players who left WoW for FFXIV feel like they're entitled the same experience FFXIV provides them in WoW because they played WoW first.

Blizzard's refusal to copy FFXIV has less to do with them "ignoring their playerbase" or "being stubborn" and more to do with them simply not caring that these players have left.

[Lathspell]

He's not wrong, WoW launched and got its popularity by catering to casuals HEAVILY.

After MoP the team largely changed for WoW, and hard focused on "hardcore" content. Which led to more than just ignoring casuals. One of the big things people dont seem to ever want to mention is the ilvl bloat which makes entering into WoW far harder than its been in the past. Likewise the dungeon design heavily encouraging to the point it later becomes requirement, that people learn skips and shortcuts further making it difficult for new people to start (and makes he community more toxic).

No matter what blizz may say, they're continuing this trend into DF with even bigger gaps and more catering exclusively to the hardcore audience. Which is no longer a minority if only because everyone else has been chased off.

How does ilvl bloat make getting into the game harder? Isn't that just a number since ilvl gets reset every patch basically.

[Shadowferal]

Yep they did, a little at a time.

And you're the one person that believes this.

After MoP the team largely changed for WoW, and hard focused on "hardcore" content. Which led to more than just ignoring casuals.

Man I felt that...that change. It went from "fun" to "wtf?"

[Lathspell]

This point of view always makes me chuckle. It's as if ex-WoW players who left WoW for FFXIV feel like they're entitled the same experience FFXIV provides them in WoW because they played WoW first.

Blizzard's refusal to copy FFXIV has less to do with them "ignoring their playerbase" or "being stubborn" and more to do with them simply not caring that these players have left.

I don't think an MMO even needs a story that much. Ultima Online was amazing for it's time and there was no player driven story at all. Atleast for me WoW is about somewhat permanent progress and fun gameplay. The story and lore stuff is nice but not really the main thing. I think a lot of people are like this. I tried to get into FFXIV but after looking up that it takes hundreds of hours to do the MSQ from start to finish before you can access any end game stuff I just gave up.

[McNeil]

Its a combination of player mentality and all the good devs leaving Blizzard. Back in old WoW (vanilla-WotLK era) the game was a lot more fresh and its genre was really taking off for the first time. WoW was basically the only real MMORPG worth playing at the time, it took up til 2012 to get its first decent competitor while today it got a lot of competition. What made WoW also unique was that it was a massive platform for player interaction. We didn't have all that much social media (I only used MSN) which were just basic chat channels, but in WoW you could actually interact and play with a lot of people which at the time was quite a phenomenon. Now there are all kinds of sources for social media so people won't feel the need to act more social in WoW to make new friends. It doesn't help that other than people not interacting with each other as much, that Blizzard is trying to make the game as hardcore as possible with stuff like mythic+ and mythic raiding. Only feeding to its toxicity to the levels of that Xbox Live had.

There is now also a lack of passion coming from the dev team. Old Blizzard really wanted to make the best games possible and act as an example to other devs on how games should be made, and yes while they also wanted to make a lot of money they did so by making good games rather than step into greedy moves like rushing out games and milk their IP's for all its worth. The devs today don't seem interested to make a good game but rather want to do their own thing (in a game that they never even made in the first place) like either pushing the competitive scene or pushing their own real life agendas. It only shows that they don't really care for the games health which does explain Blizzards stubbornness over the years. It wasn't until FF14 took off again and a lot of players migrated to that game for them to realise that they need to listen more to the actual players which explains removing the ripcord and making sure Dragonflight isn't overloaded again with systems.

Also playing Classic WoW made me realise (and apparently a lot of other folks) why WoW used to be so good and why WotLK is considered as the best expansion. Even while it has some flaws it did so many things right that keeps people playing. An expansion like Shadowlands doesn't hold my interest for longer than a month.

[Osmeric]

I think they've got a design requirement that a certain percentage of the players should be doing each particular slice of difficulty. This percentage in M raids, this in H raids, etc.

But as the casuals bleed out, and the better players remain, this means all the difficulties have to be increased to maintain these percentages in the remaining player population. The game slowly strangles itself as previously "good" players are now told their place is the lower ranks of difficulty.

[Accendor]

WoW was originally made by disgruntled Everquest players who wanted to make a game that anyone could enjoy. And they succeeded. Then hardcore WoW raiders wormed their way into the dev team and became the leads, and redesigned the game to cater to hardcore raiders like themselves, at the expense of everyone else. Over the course of 10 years, everyone except hardcore raiders and addicts have been driven off.

Year except the habe literally never catered to hardcore raiders but completely focused on casuals for the last 15 years. Just because a higher raid difficulty exist, doesn't mean the habe is build around it. Only class balance is and that is fair enough.

[nvaelz]

I liked the game more when it was like in vanilla a bunch of spells but usually you would use like 1 spell for example a mage would cast 1 spell all the time, but then they changed, especially in Shadowlands to a style that is like 8 spells you have to combo all the time and it's just worse and worse.

Also the reason I don't like m+ is bcuz I understand that to be good at m+ I have to do rotations with my group about who is supposed to use their dmg cds at what pack and also learning these m+ routes really makes me not interested, it's too competitive and not what I enjoy from PVE, it's still true that when I lvl I really enjoy all dungeons up to Legion, BFA where m+ really started and the dungeon design is really about those skips and rotating cds on packs, but to be fair SL is ALOT worse than Legion or BFA when it comes to how boring the dungeons are.

Also even the old dungeons now feel like diluted juice bcuz of the modern combat systems, where the old system was basically that your attack did big dmg and your ability to press your button and not afk deterimed your output, but now it's less impact and more of a expectation that you spam your low impact abilities and it's really unbalanced between the specs and classes while you lvl like, some classes, even healers will 5x another class dps bcuz it's so badly designed.

Also these secondary stats like hit rating and value of mana management and parry etc how you would have to navigate these problems while playing really made pve alot more fun, like playing a fury warrior and having 15% chance to miss was actually fun to me but now it's just about comboing your abilities.

Also how threat works is kinda a symptom of everything else, back in the b4 u had to be conscious about your threat management but now it's like sure you get threat but it's cuz the tank didn't auto attack 1 time on that target and it's very much like diluted juice.

[Relapses]

I don't think an MMO even needs a story that much. Ultima Online was amazing for it's time and there was no player driven story at all. Atleast for me WoW is about somewhat permanent progress and fun gameplay. The story and lore stuff is nice but not really the main thing. I think a lot of people are like this. I tried to get into FFXIV but after looking up that it takes hundreds of hours to do the MSQ from start to finish before you can access any end game stuff I just gave up.

It's fine if that's what you want out of a game. But it's also fine that two different MMOs provide different experiences. There seems to be a lot of players who want metric fuck-tons of single player driven content in their MMO and FFXIV scratches that itch pretty well. But that doesn't mean that you should accuse other MMO developers of failing to innovate because they refuse to make their game just like the one you prefer. It's such a weird way to look at things.

[hzjf]

WoW was originally made by disgruntled Everquest players who wanted to make a game that anyone could enjoy. And they succeeded. Then hardcore WoW raiders wormed their way into the dev team and became the leads, and redesigned the game to cater to hardcore raiders like themselves, at the expense of everyone else. Over the course of 10 years, everyone except hardcore raiders and addicts have been driven off.

oh my.. stop with this insane stupid myth that this game is catered to hardcore raiders

[pahbi]

This point of view always makes me chuckle. It's as if ex-WoW players who left WoW for FFXIV feel like they're entitled the same experience FFXIV provides them in WoW because they played WoW first.

Blizzard's refusal to copy FFXIV has less to do with them "ignoring their playerbase" or "being stubborn" and more to do with them simply not caring that these players have left.

Yeah but think about it.

The game really hasn't grown or changed or evolved at all from its basic formula.

Everything for the last 18ish years has just been tinkering around the edges of that original game.

Put another way, people have changed, but wow really hasn't.

But really, what motivation is there to change? Blizz is making money hand over fist with what they have, and there are tons of loyal fans willing to pay Blizz to keep right on doing what they are doing. If I was Blizz, I probably wouldn't change anything either.

We can also acknowledge that making fundamental changes to a 18 year product is probably a huge, costly undertaking, fraught with technical issues.

Given all of that, I'd still really like Blizz to come out of their echo chamber, look around, and see if there are elements of other MMOs they could use to enhance WoW.

[Relapses]

Yeah but think about it.

The game really hasn't grown or changed or evolved at all from its basic formula.

Everything for the last 18ish years has just been tinkering around the edges of that original game.

Put another way, people have changed, but wow really hasn't.

But really, what motivation is there to change? Blizz is making money hand over fist with what they have, and there are tons of loyal fans willing to pay Blizz to keep right on doing what they are doing. If I was Blizz, I probably wouldn't change anything either.

We can also acknowledge that making fundamental changes to a 18 year product is probably a huge, costly undertaking, fraught with technical issues.

Given all of that, I'd still really like Blizz to come out of their echo chamber, look around, and see if there are elements of other MMOs they could use to enhance WoW.

I really don't think that this is true at all. Blizzard tries to reinvent the wheel too much, imo, which is why we've had so many fucking systems on systems within systems in the last few expansions. Covenants were particularly offensive with Blizzard seeming to design the game not for the playerbase they actually had but rather the playerbase that they wanted to have. That's why DF seems to be a return to form for Blizzard. They're undoing the system focus and trying to focus instead on the brass tacks of what makes the game fun. I don't know if it's 100% the best way forward but it certainly seems a helluva lot more promising than SL did at this same point in its development cycle.

[Razorice]

You said what the problem is; the amount of dungeons you run should slow down after you start getting raid gear, not continue indefinitely parallel to raid progression. After you start raiding, you stomp the dungeon; helping friends gear up, chasing achievements, maybe a mount or transmog. The artificial difficulty of M+ is absurd, it fractures the community over so many levels of play, just as the raid difficulty splits.

The game has become so much about numbers to the community since WotLK gearscore, and Blizzard just fully embraced it and implemented more and more systems that essentially split the community. I see population stratification in WoW similar to Diablo 3; if you miss the initial rush to the top, you are screwed and essentially by yourself with the exception being maybe a handful of friends. Nobody wants you because of your numbers. Adding new difficult dungeons in patches is great. Playing the same dungeon on 20+ difficulty levels for so many ilvls of the same item is not exactly fun and engaging, it's fanatic and addictive.

The amount of M+ you run can slow down when you get gear though? You don't have to do 9 weekly M+ if you're full BiS or have all the BiS items from m+ anyway.
I'm not sure what the issue is with inflating the difficulty of dungeons, I'd rather do a difficult dungeon for the challenge of it rather than a snooze fest HC dungeons used to be with Heroic gear. You can easily help your friends by boosting them in a +20 with a group of friends that know wtf they are doing anyway.

[schwarzkopf]

And you're the one person that believes this

It isn't a belief; it is the objective truth of the matter. Your disbelief reflects on the second point I made.

[NatePsy]

It's a game that hasn't really evolved with the times. It's a game made for people with a lot of time to spare and unfortunately it's struggling to lure those types to the game while also actively going out of their way to run off the people that have played since the game's inception as those players just don't have the time anymore to spare. I used to have all the time in the world to game but now I've got a fiancé, a job & a wedding to work on so what little time I do have goes towards games that aren't demanding of my time, quick and fulfilling where rewarding gameplay is concerned.

I used to love the gear treadmill but catching up to get into the harder content is demanding of my time, I wouldn't even think of a raid guild either since having a job basically means 7-8pm to 10-11pm raid schedule is nigh impossible with the shifts I do and the fellow Australian playerbase doesn't really have much else in the way of raid schedules.

It's basically what a few people in this thread have already said, Blizzard's most loyal playerbase has grown up and can't devote the time anymore. I find myself logging in, looking over all the content that will make my life easier, legendaries, conduits etc, and pretty much feeling overwhelmed with how much time all of that will take to do to the point where I just exit the game and play something else. They've created a grinding problem for the essential things.

[Aucald]

"WoW is Dying/Dead" type threads don't tend to produce much in the way of constructive discussion or debate. Closing this.