Signs that blizzard are giving in to lazy players?

[Deleted]

Firstly, i'd like to say that i completely understand that blizzard are trying to aim WOW in MOP towards the more casual player and have seen the positive. However, i would like to voice my concerns and disappointment to the direction that wow is going.

It seems to me that Blizzard are totally ruining the hard work that they have done in the past, and merely down tuning it to make this game casual friendly, making the game feel very lazy
Some examples:

Professions-
These used to be skills that players would put time and effort into in order to reap in the rewards. Cooking- farming animals from different zones to level up. Fishing-moving from zone to zone and putting in effort to reach max fishing cap. Herbalism- visiting zones to pick different flowers. Now, in this current patch and looking at patch 5.3, it makes all these professions pretty meaningless. You can level max cooking at Halfhill very easily. Herbalism in the next patch means that herbs can be picked anywhere in Pandaria and so you can level it up without going to Kalimdor/Outland or Eastern Kingdoms. You can also do the same with Blacksmithing and ghost iron ore to level up

Not only does this damage the auction house economy via low level mats now but it makes these professions stupidly easy to level up at max level, making them feel quite worthless and unrewarding.

Raids-
I wont get much into LFR as i know that there are so many different views on it. I like the fact that it gives casual players to visit new content but it just gives an easy mindless gearing up route for the lazy wow player.

PVP-
It feels like blizzard have dug a huge hole, adding pvp power and now in patch 5.3, they want to change pvp and give resilience to every single player. While i see this is another good change for casual players as well as the removal of the 2.2k boundary on gear. It kind of ruins the whole "special" feeling of pvp.

TBC and WOTLK had a great pvp system i thought- rewarding players with gear when they reach a certain level for each set piece. This gave players who wanted to pvp something to aim for, something to achieve and feel proud of themselves. With a little time and effort put in on learning how to play, a lot of players would reach it. Now, i feel as though there is nothing to really aim for in pvp. It feels like daily quests- you have to cap every week to get to conquest point boundary where you can then buy the elite tyrannical gear( even this is being thrown away in patch 5.3).

From these points, while nice for the casual player which i understand, it really makes this game feel a lot less rewarding, a lot less special and kinda disappointing

Anybody else agree?

[Deleted]

I agree with the pvp part for sure, I remember getting my shoulders in wotlk and it felt awesome to really achieve that. Now its just log on and hope that we dont run into too many healer/dps combos slowing down the point getting process.

I kind of agree with the professions as well, there was a nice feeling of satisfaction getting your professions leveled but for me personally at the end of the day I done it merely for the extra stats bonus. I suppose the extra stats are a reward for the time/gold investment and it shouldnt be diminished since at the end of the day the people who take the time to level the crafting professions should be more rewarded than people who just take 2 gathering professions which takes like 1/4th the time of crafting.
I dunno, the lazy me who has leveled tailoring/enchanting on all chars before the removal of rods thinks its a pretty decent idea to make the grind easier but the vindictive side of me who has leveled tailoring/enchanting on all chars still wants people to experience my pain!

[heltvild]

im just happy i dont have to cap conq on my 3 chars every single week for like 3 months before they are in full gear.

[Detheavn]

I don't really agree.

Professions weren't things "players would put time and effort into in order to reap in the rewards". Most materials, if not all of them were easily nabbed from the AH. Also the rewards are shabby at best. Basically this split leveling a profession into two categories.
1. A chore to level for those with no gold.
2. No effort required for those with gold.

I like how raid discussions basically come down to LFR nowadays. There is no sense in discussing this if you aren't even including regular raids and their effect on players.

As for PvP, Blizzard has always stated that PvP wasn't the main point of this game, so making it less 'hardcore' seems like a good thing to do, especially seeing that it should be a game about skill and improvisation versus gear. Everyone will be on an equal level field this way. As for the rating requirements back in TBC: It was fun, but this basically limited how strong a person could get from doing BGs and truely forced people into arenas. Some people may actually not like arenas.
I for one love the action going on in RBGs while arenas are just a way to quick cap the fist couple of points for the week.

[Kathranis]

Professions in WoW have always been really simple compared to other MMOs. You just gather a few materials, learn a recipee, and click create. Not like in Everquest where you had to figure a lot out on your own, put the correct number of materials into a creation interface, and would destroy materials and fail if you did it wrong or didn't have high enough skill.

There's no interesting or compelling gameplay in having to go back to old zones and farm old mats. It's just a time waster. Run around Thousand Needles looting Sungrass so you can make 20 potions just to get skillups, then vendor the potions because they're useless and nobody wants them. Yeah, really requires a lot of effort and feels very rewarding.


I personally like LFR. I've never been a raider, but LFR is a great no-pressure way to see content and gear up a bit. I personally prefer gearing up in a couple LFR runs to having to farm the same three heroic dungeons for weeks and buying the gear with valor points, but that's just me.


As for PVP, I can't really comment. I stopped seriously PVPing after Burning Crusade, when the focus started shifting to arenas over BGs. I've sort of lost interest in PVP since then. Seems to me that random BGs are just as frustrating as they were in Classic and BC, where you'd either get a crappy group or go up against a strong group and it felt like a total waste of time with tons of people complaining. Or sometimes you were against the crappy group or part of a strong group and it was easy.

[Otimus]

Firstly, i'd like to say that i completely understand that blizzard are trying to aim WOW in MOP towards the more casual player and have seen the positive. However, i would like to voice my concerns and disappointment to the direction that wow is going.

It seems to me that Blizzard are totally ruining the hard work that they have done in the past, and merely down tuning it to make this game casual friendly, making the game feel very lazy
Some examples:

Professions-
These used to be skills that players would put time and effort into in order to reap in the rewards. Cooking- farming animals from different zones to level up. Fishing-moving from zone to zone and putting in effort to reach max fishing cap. Herbalism- visiting zones to pick different flowers. Now, in this current patch and looking at patch 5.3, it makes all these professions pretty meaningless. You can level max cooking at Halfhill very easily. Herbalism in the next patch means that herbs can be picked anywhere in Pandaria and so you can level it up without going to Kalimdor/Outland or Eastern Kingdoms. You can also do the same with Blacksmithing and ghost iron ore to level up

Not only does this damage the auction house economy via low level mats now but it makes these professions stupidly easy to level up at max level, making them feel quite worthless and unrewarding.

Raids-
I wont get much into LFR as i know that there are so many different views on it. I like the fact that it gives casual players to visit new content but it just gives an easy mindless gearing up route for the lazy wow player.

PVP-
It feels like blizzard have dug a huge hole, adding pvp power and now in patch 5.3, they want to change pvp and give resilience to every single player. While i see this is another good change for casual players as well as the removal of the 2.2k boundary on gear. It kind of ruins the whole "special" feeling of pvp.

TBC and WOTLK had a great pvp system i thought- rewarding players with gear when they reach a certain level for each set piece. This gave players who wanted to pvp something to aim for, something to achieve and feel proud of themselves. With a little time and effort put in on learning how to play, a lot of players would reach it. Now, i feel as though there is nothing to really aim for in pvp. It feels like daily quests- you have to cap every week to get to conquest point boundary where you can then buy the elite tyrannical gear( even this is being thrown away in patch 5.3).

From these points, while nice for the casual player which i understand, it really makes this game feel a lot less rewarding, a lot less special and kinda disappointing

Anybody else agree?

There sure as hell shouldn't be a "Special" feeling in the terms you put it in a PVP game. That has zero place in a PVP game. Rewards should 100% be cosmetic, otherwise, you have extremely absurd and unfair elements. It's not like they're even doing that, though. It SHOULD be like that, though, but it isn't. But it's a start.


Also, I'd like to add that arguing about laziness in a videogame is pretty silly. A lot of those painfully slow/pointless parts of the game exist mostly to make you play longer, to make you pay longer.

[Tornainbow]

I've been playing since vanilla and I actually think that Blizzard is making some really smart decisions about keeping the game relevant.

Raiding content was only enjoyed by like 2% of the population and it was obviously an unsustainable model for both the playerbase and financially for the devs.

PvP is totally borked because the gear gaps are gigantic. It would be like a good golfer getting extra strokes forgiven or the fastest runner getting a shorter route. It creates a huge gap that keeps the elite on top and everyone else below. It needs corrected and I'm glad to see it is. The top 1% of PvPers are still going to dominate, get the highest ranks and have people watch their streams. The difference is now the casualy PvPer has something to work for and doesn't get instagibbed in randoms because of artificial gear gaps.

Professions I'm less enthusiastic about but something does need done about some of the old content patterns etc. Time will tell on that front.

I also see all the account-wide changes as being good for alts and the overall WoW experience.

I think they are on the right track to keep the game fresh and make it possible for new players to enjoy it. I loved Vanilla and BC but I also have to realize those times were unique and are gone now.

[MasterHamster]

There's a very distinct difference being lazy and being put off by design that no longer works

[Itisamuh]

I've got to disagree with you on the PvP stuff. Not necessarily with the resilience change (I'm not sure what to think of that yet) but with the rating requirement on gear. Competition isn't supposed to be about rewarding better players with better stuff to give them inherent advantages against worse players. It's about having everyone on completely equal footing, where the winner won with skill and nothing else. Truly competitive players don't give a crap about gear in PvP, and would rather it not even factor in at all. Anything moving more in that direction is a good thing.

[Deleted]

Ok, OP, you have no idea what you are talking about and just picking at stuff for the sake of complaining.

They made cooking 1-600 easy, yes. But they made up for that with the Mastering, which required a lot of effort when the expansion was out. Cooking is a secondary profession, like First Aid, it should be fast and easy to level up without having to pay a lot for the mats off the AH.

Herbalism and Mining are an absolute pain to level up, and players resorted to botting (not just gold farmers use bots) to level it. While it won't stamp out botting completely, it's much better to focus on one continent that players are still happy to explore and still have stuff to do in (treasure finding, rare killing, dailies).

You should maybe do some research on BS levelling via Ghost Iron before commenting. It is EXPENSIVE to do it that way, most of the time you are better off leveling it the old fashioned way. It is there to fill the void if a certain material is unavailable or being sold for extortionate amounts on the AH.

The PvP changes have nothing to do with being lazy at all. They are trying to fix it. We still don't know why the changes were made and what else will be done, the patch notes have been out a day give them a chance to explain.

[Airwaves]

TBC and good pvp in the same sentence... Someone didn't play BC. Right now is ALOT more balanced then it was then. It seems like they want to push pvp into needing skill and not gear. It has nothing to do with lazy players.

LFR also has nothing to do with lazy players. It's there to give people who can't raid normal and heroic raids because of real life commitments a chance to do the content blizz puts hundreds of hours of work into. Before that all that work only got seen but a few % of the player base which would have seemed like a waste of time for them.

This just feels like a thread made for the sake of whining.

[Malcor]

This just feels like a thread made for the sake of whining.

You mean like 99% of MMO-Champion WoW posts?

[notorious98]

Herbalism and Mining are an absolute pain to level up, and players resorted to botting (not just gold farmers use bots) to level it.

What? Since when have gathering professions been an absolute pain to level up? Especially since they've allowed flying in the old zones? If you can't easily level either of them while leveling your toon, you're doing it wrong. Even if you're power leveling it, it shouldn't take you that long. If players resorted to botting, it's because they're lazy, not because the profession is "a pain".

[Deleted]

What? Since when have gathering professions been an absolute pain to level up? Especially since they've allowed flying in the old zones? If you can't easily level either of them while leveling your toon, you're doing it wrong. Even if you're power leveling it, it shouldn't take you that long. If players resorted to botting, it's because they're lazy, not because the profession is "a pain".

Its quite easy to level them, however once you hit outland and northrend there is a general lack of nodes until you hit saronite from fel iron and up, due to few nodes in the first place combined with CRZ.

[Deleted]

How can anyone with the slightest bit of common sense be upset with what they are doing with PvP gear in 5.2 and soon 5.3. This way everyone will be on equal foot which should always be the case in PvP. It should be about skill, not gear, I like the way this is going.

[Milmo]

This has been argued since TBC and for the most part it's confirmation bias. This game has more challenging content now than it ever had and is as competitive as it ever was, if you choose to go and look for it. If you are a casual gamer, then yes, it is now more casual friendly. Casual players have been complaining that raids were far beyond their capabilities and/or time commitment. Same thing with PvP. You'll never get top ranking in PvP or in raiding if you don't have the skill and time commitment, but what you will get is a taste of some of that content at a more leisurely pace, instead of not seeing it at all. That is all that have changed, don't mistake accessibility for capitulation.

[Imnick]

I think rather than "lazy" I'd see it as "common sense changes to things that shouldn't have been added in the first place because they are tedious rather than fun"

[Deleted]

I remember back in TBC I used to lose 10 arena games a week and eventually getting great PvE weapons! Time yes, effort no, learning how to play, no!

[Zenotetsuken]

Raiding content was only enjoyed by like 2% of the population and it was obviously an unsustainable model for both the playerbase and financially for the devs.

You are thinking of Heroic Raiding. Raiding in general has always been a higher % than that.

I am honestly not sure what the point of the OP is. It isn't like any of this is new. Blizzard didn't just all of a sudden go "Holy crap guys, we need to cater to our core demographic!" and then make sweeping changes. It has been a steady curve in that direction since late BC.
They will continue to "streamline" the mmo experience until even the most casual players start leaving, and saying "This game is so easy that it has become pointless to continue to paying to play it."

[Frolk]

I like how i can do BGs now and not be roflstompd since i havnt spent a week farming for gear, if thats giving in to lazy people then i admit it, im lazy for just wanting to do some BGs with my guildies