Last edited by mrromo; 2013-05-10 at 08:22 PM.
Gotta agree with some of this. They push LFR so hard now but 4 separate queues for Throne of Thunder means 4 hours of waiting just to raid (if you are lucky). 2/3 queues for me personally requires me to queue twice for the same place b/c I get put in on the 3rd boss, therefore requiring me to requeue to do bosses 1&2.
I do okay on loot. Some weeks I get some and some I do not. This entire expansion though has seen my struggling to get the 4th piece of a tier set on any toon.
I have yet to see a mount drop on any new boss in MoP.
While I would love vanilla/TBC servers as that was my favorite time playing the game, it's not going to happen. Might be fun though.
What is it with you people and talent trees!? Did you like wasting points on useless talents you never used out of pve or pvp just to reach that one necessary skill (the Hunter trees were loaded with piss awful talents)!? Both systems have cookie-cutter builds, but if you're telling me the old system was great, I guess you forgot the days of, "U BETAR HHEV 0/5/33 OR GTFO MY GAEM U FACKEN FAGIT NUB." I don't miss those days, and I like having more options for my class that aren't useless.
You know most of those old talent trees were useless even for pve and pvp in older xpacs, right? Do I have to remind anyone how awful MM Huntards, Sublety Rogues, Retardins, Non-Afflic Locks, certain Mage builds, and Laser Chickens were WITH the old system depending on the expansion (some of the branches still have problems)? Yes, the new talent system kinda sucks (there are a lot of useless choices), but you're stupid to think the old system was perfect.
To be honest we don't even know how the subscription numbers are based (how much of a % does Asia account for all WoW subscriptions?) and how large a % of "most subs from Asia" is it from the total? I often think it's just thrown in to soothe the statistic, and it's usually a sign WoW is falling in terms of popularity in some continents.
A million subs lost is still a lot of customer support laid off, a ton of income lost and an alarming statistic in the business world. For instance, what else does it say? It says that it's becoming a fact that WoW has reached its peak in subscriptions, that the subscriptions tend to drop faster after every expansion and that Blizzard is gradually beginning to put weight on their newer games.
I don't think the end of WoW will ever come---at least not in another 10-20 years. There might come a point where the game goes F2P (at least to some degree) instead of releasing expansions on a yearly basis.
MMO player
WoW: 2006-2020 || EvE: 2013-2020 // 2023- || FFXIV: 2020- || Lost Ark: 2022-
Again, valor isn't for hardcore players. You buy 1-3 pieces of gear, and forget about it. In 5.3 they'll allow you to upgrade gear again, to make valor valuable for hardcore players. Casuals if smart, will not waste valor on upgrading gear, but buying new gear.
When Justice Points were introduced in TBC, no progressing guild liked the idea of casuals farming justice points to gear up, that was relatively equal to raiding gear. Some pieces were best in slot, but otherwise overall bad reaction from raiders.Just because you don't personally see the problem with a game that has so many caps built into its design (not just the valor cap bear in mind---I quit when the only thing I really enjoyed was farming older raid instances for transmogrification gear and it felt like I was paying to roll the slot machine once a week) doesn't mean it's not a major reason we're seeing a decline in subscriptions. The game has many problems, but players constantly hitting walls (whether it be gated content, reputation quests, valor caps, weekly lockouts, etc) has become one of the most common reasons players look to games that doesn't focus on *restricting* what they want to do.
Do I agree with the cap? No, because it's to force you to pay subscription. Understand though no raider, or hardcore player, cares about valor. Blizzard noticed, and introduced the upgrade vendor. Upgrade your gear by a measly 8 ilevels. For progression guilds, this is a must. It gets players back into dungeons and scenarios, which btw once you got the gear you need, you'll never want to step foot in there again.
It is a casual issue, and a minor one at that. I'm surprised nobody is angry about Justice Points, seeing as they're useless. Should just be removed from the game.
You might have missed the main point. Sports endure without content patches because they are fun. You don't need new content to keep people playing. Starcraft 1 and Diablo 2 didn't have updates for like a decade and were great because they were fun. Now that it's been spelled out for you, maybe you can figure out the point that is being made.
---------- Post added 2013-05-10 at 05:30 PM ----------
If you've burned through roughly a third of your wealth in 1-2 years, you're definitely headed that way. I think McHammer would have outperformed you =-p
I think the neglect regarding some classes and speccs has a lot to do with some quitting the game. Players simply get tired of waiting for attention and fixes that should've been done perhaps years ago. Figured out my specc yet? Hpriest. We've been the same since WotLK pretty much with useless spells, no good utility and not even good output, poor scaling and very low % of healing roles and very much overshadowed by Disc and other healingclasses. I have patients. Lots of it, cause I did stick to the specc, never been interested in Disc, Shadow or changing main. But I feel it's really getting to me after all these years, we pay and play and we are a lot of dedicated, very skilled main Hpriests who pointed out what is wrong and what could be done, but no attention. "Holy Priests are fine", yet most of us were forced to play Disc more than our MS the last years.
They were talking about removing PoH as a groupbased spells years ago. Lightwell was a pain for years before the redesign. Chakra have made most Holy miserable since it's release in WotLK. I could go on and on.
I agree Blizzard should reconsider their employed lead designers. I don't buy the "We need more designers/devs/programmers, but don't want to hire just anybody". GC's lack of understanding the classes, yet pretending he knows everything is getting very old by now.
I think to get players back they need to rly get on their toes balancing each specc/class and make small adjustments much more often. I would also love to see something completly new besides the usual dungeon, raids and quests. Scenarios just fell flat. I think hc scenarios will aswell. Challange mode is nothing exciting. Pet battles... meh. Dailys........puke! VP req reputation, again... more puke.
We need big and epic. A real adventure. Perhaps longlasting world events involving all players (remember the zombie invasion etc?). Perhaps real guildwars. Guilds gets their own area in the world but can be attacked by other guilds? Now that would make even me interested in PvP..lol.
Some raids, new quests and dungeons isn't enough to feed the WoW players anymore.
Was expecting someone (you) having a debate would use sources when making claims and stating facts wrong? not sure what's worse, the fact I assumed you would be able to hold an educated discussion or that you could even support your baseless claims.
No, content flow is not causing loss of subs, more and cheaper forms of competition are. Also, wrong usage of the word irony. There is nothing ironic about you claiming your own opinions as facts and assuming your post is the informative one. Let alone the fact you obviously didn't even read their official response which is a reword of the aforementioned.
Again, studying the industry and the game followed by intellectual and realistic feedback to developers is damaging the game? Perhaps I should take your "noble" approach of regurgitating madeup statistics and contingencies while taking information out of context to support negative claims and opinions.
Stop getting offended. Just because I disagree with you doesn't mean you have to get all emotional. If you can't handle a little debating don't post disagreeing. Keep it to yourself. But, honestly I don't think you mean what you say as I do think you are somewhat curious and while I might not know everything, and while you should not get offended at this--if you continue to study the trends and information here I am sure you can learn a lot about what is to come. The game has been cast as dying for YEARS... By sheer chance alone my claim is more probable than yours given the game's history. Do you have any idea how DIFFICULT it would be to have this game completely DIE. Lets say they lost all their subs tomorrow, don't you think they would make it go F2P or develope some other new transaction method to encourage people to play? You are talking about money mogools, multi billion dollar investors and marketing GENIUSES.... seriously think about what you are saying...
Ding Dong the witch is dead :P
dailies ruined the game for many. worst casual player expansion ever, thats what happens...
Yeah, one of those subscribers was me! My guild collapsed and I just don't have the time or energy to find a new one, considering this is like the 5th time it's happened to me over the years. Anyway, my coursework will thank me for the quit
Within the casual group there is a big portion that want insta gratification though, hence why they both are bunched up by a lot of people.
You assume all those things are actually good, for me you just mentioned some of the things I think Blizzard did wrong evolving the game...you might not like it but dungeons that took 45 minutes ment you had something to do in game, 25 and 10 man being on separate lockouts meant you had more content if you wanted to play a lot, not to mention how epic 40 man raids where, although doubt it would work to go back to 40man raids today so I'll give you that one.
So no, those changes didn't benefit me.
Actually it reached it at the end of TBC already, Wrath sales might have pushed it up a couple of hundred thousand for a month but that's about it, only time after that it's been back to the end of TBC numbers is the month Cata was launched.
How is having a direction the same as a having a niche? Nothing I said remotely resembled me suggesting WoW becoming a niche. I think you need to look up the word. But fyi, niche products can scale. Also, 8.3 million users is not massive scale in technology.
You have clearly misunderstood all my points and you're stating nonsensical arguments. You're trying to make it look like you're saying something, but you're not. You're making a point that you should be able to find pleasure in everything... duh? You're making a point that the game is growing, who's arguing that the game is not growing? We're speculating how the game is growing. Not whether it's growing or not.
And for your information, I've never cared about the difficulty of the game. My complains stem from Blizzard eliminating social aspects of the game and raid progression. Don't act like difficulty is the only thing people are complaining about, just because it's the most well known complaint. If you think about it, you're agreeing with me. You're saying too many people are complaining and everyone can't get what they want, which is exactly why I suggested that Blizzard stops listening to users who don't know how to develop games. Blizzard is a professional game developing company, we all know they can create what people want, just look at all of their previous releases.
"Get out there, try new things, compete in difficult content, gauge your performance and compare yourself on the plethora of resources which enable you to test your limits."
^ This has been true since the release of vanilla. I'll explain to you in baby terms, just in case: There's 5 different activities that people enjoy at release of vanilla, 8-10 years later there's 7 activities but they have slightly changed. Players can still explore and try to find pleasure in them, but since they have changed, they might or might not be as pleasurable anymore. It's subjective. People are not arguing that there are no options, people are arguing that the options aren't as enjoyable.
The first paragraph was for you. The rest, I was speaking generally in the thread. However, I can see where it would seem I was addressing you and for that I apologize. I actually agree with most of your points.
Nevertheless, a niche is exactly what you are saying. I took the liberty of looking up the word as you demanded and I urge you to read it.
a : a place, employment, status, or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted <finally found her niche>
You are asking the game to find a direction and stick with it. Even on a broad scale, like targeting a specific demographic like 'casual players'--that becomes the game's niche. Even using such a broad example, you can see how a game/genre meant to last can force self limitation. When products become too targeted they lose the possibility of gaining customers and players if they broadened their horizons. You also contradict yourself by saying a niche can grow because that is exactly what WoW has done. It started out being a game for MMO fans by bringing together all the things people loved from titles like EQ and Ultima Online and sprinkled a bit of innovation. Now it has become a game almost any gamer can enjoy, not just a MMO fan.
Last edited by Crookids; 2013-05-11 at 05:13 AM.
Actually, it was very easy to mess up your specs with the old tree (thank god for respecs). Just look back at all of the terrible Hunter builds up til the end of BC or the beginning of Wrath (no one really knew how to really play the game up til BC/Wrath out of poopsock raiders/pvp players).
Both methods force you to pick crappy talents, but there were more garbage talents you just couldn't skip with the old tree. Old school Hunters had to pick from a crappy trap talent that never proc'd or go for some pvp skill that didn't help them....even in pvp...for 2-3 expansions. Then you had left over points that weren't worth using. Rogues and Druids had a lot of terrible talent choices too (Moonkin was still scoffed at til Cata, and Combat dominated Sub for a while).
I don't miss wasting 2-3 out of 25 points to get a crappy skill like Silencing Shot (I hated this shot on my old Huntard, and again, Hunters had a bunch of terrible talents).
Thinking that you "waste" points in a talent tree just shows that you are looking at it the wrong way, the choices are not each talent you put in but key once and the "wasted" is the road there representing minor choices.
While WoW's version of talent trees had it's issues most of them was due to lack of options to chose from and as such the solution would be to introduce more choices, not less. Best game I played so far over the past decade as far as talents goes is Path of Exile which has 120 talent points to spend on over 1300 nodes...now that's choice.
I don't even... The hypocrisy leaks from every pore of this post. 3 hours spent on trash, 3 hours spent in a dungeon with 40 people, you don't even get gold. epic riding was expensive.
Not really sure what you want, free stuff, or stupid hard stuff. But that's the player base these days. Its too hard -And- too easy
The cartoonish nature of WoW has always been their aesthetic. I've played both SWTOR and GW2. Their graphics didn't "exceed" MoP in any area.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zq1aXvXhqMI
Vs...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GnKetq8aPI4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feQbXKcDsSc
Last edited by Dolus; 2013-05-11 at 07:58 AM.
Like I said its not a bad thing for our main to go through the content without flying, But when I'm leveling my uptenth alt, the content has been seen, the danger has been felt, and for all intents and purposes I just want my alt to 90 so I can do other content with him. What I'm saying is they screwed up by not COMPROMISING. They did it in wrath, and it worked wonders there (remember the level 80 heirloom that let you fly) even if they added it late in the expac.
As for rep, regardless of weather the rep from tabards is bad or not is irrelevant. It has been stated previously that if they add a way to do something easier and then take it away the player base feels jipped. This is not inaccurate, which is why I personally think they should just meet us halfway. Let some of the lower tier reps be Dungeonable (like golden lotus), but let Like shado-pan and stuff require dailies. Vanity reps, say for the dragon riding skill should be daily only as well. I would see no issue with the rep from dungeons being capped at the limit you would get from doing dailies either.
As far as the dungeon finder being the cause, I also disagree. Especially for low pop realms. I remember a time when it took hours to get a group to go dungeon running, and even then you would still play with people who either are new too the game or are so bad it makes your brain hurt. This is NOT a healthy model for a game of WoW's size. What I will say is this, The DF and LFR SHOULD group you with people from your own realm as a priority over other realms, but it shouldn't be forced too.
Wrath was the ultimate compromise, wrath was when casuals got to play the game, while there was still elitist content. As such wrath was the expac with the best numbers. Flip to Cata, Cata was Blizzard catering to the most fickle player on the game the special snowflake or the elitist, not the silent elitist mind you, but the wannabe's that cover both forums here and there. Everything was a jump in difficulty for lower end content, While for me this was not a bad thing as I was capable of handling the content with my guild. I could see how it would have been alienating to players who only played for a few hours a week, and then looked what happened, the subscriptions dropped like a rock, and blizzard rushed out the rest of the expac making it a terrible mess save for Ragnaros which was the best encounter in the whole expac.It started way before that, back towards the end of Wrath when they started to cater more and more to a more casual crowd that wanted any and all conveniences, so the player base changed and now the very same casual players can "finish" the game in a couple of weeks and unsubscribe to move on to the flavor of the month MMO and complete that while they wait for new content to be added.
Blizzard mostly did this to them selfs by discarding one player base for a larger but more fickle one.
Now jump to panda, we are back to the wrath model on dungeons oh look subscribers jumped up a bit! Wait we are going backwards with grinding because the elitist think that our grind needs to be like BC, oh hello our subs are going down again. Sad to say elitists only take up a small percent the so called casual plays much much more, but as always I've been a fan of compromise, and when blizzard did its compromising the game was the healthiest its ever been. It's not difficult to figure out.
I guess what I'm trying to say is Neither side is wrong or right, and that just means we should comprimise.
Last edited by Nefroz; 2013-05-11 at 08:02 AM.