Blizzard should swallow their pride to save WoW

[Nocuous]

First I have to admit, I didn't read the 11 pages of comments, so maybe someone said this.

If you read the WoW forums, all the casuals complain that the reason they are leaving is because Blizzard has made MoP too elitest like it was in Vanilla/BC. Gearing is too hard due to double and often triple gating (Golden Lotus Exalted to get Shado-Pan or August Celestials, in addition to gating with VP), no new 5 man dungeons in 5.2 giving 476 or 483 epics allowing access to ToT, too many dailies taking up too much time in order to gain rep and access to gear.

Here lies the problem: If they go back to the Vanilla/BC model casuals aren't happy; if they go back to the Wrath/Cata model hardcores aren't happy.

Personally, I like how they they have tried to find a balance between the two.

What I don't like is a post for another day...

[notorious98]

What kind of argument is that? They are not competing with most F2P MMOs (not to mention 90% of F2P MMOs likely don't have the player base of WoW either).

Morhaime did point out that the bulk of the decline came from the East, where the competition from free-to-play MMORPGs is fierce. "Given the more competitive market, and the length of time since the last expansion, we do expect further volatility this year," Morhaime said.

(Source)

If it's good enough for Morhaime, it's good enough for me and should be more than adequate for you as well.

[Thirtyrock]

As a few of you will know who have seen my recent WOW videos I have returned after a 3 year break to see what has gone wrong with the game I played 6 times a week for 6 years of my life.

One word can easily sum up what is wrong with WOW and that word is "IMMERSION"

When I played through Vanilla and BC many years ago this game was incredible, the immersion of the whole experience engulfed you so much that you literally could lose yourself for hours in the world of Azeroth.

To get immersion the one thing you need is a thriving world and WOW used to have that in abundance. Everywhere was busy, Horde and Alliance would often meet in random places as two guilds were on their way to various Dungeons and this small skirmish would often escalate into a large war.

The game was total sandbox, no one had any idea what would happen during your daily play time. Our guild would have a plan to maybe go to BRD but on the way we may be ganked by another guild, again this would start a war off which usually ended with both sides calling in other guilds for help. Then when you eventually got into the Dungeon you had to concentrate, use your class well and be prepared for at least a good hour long Dungeon.

Then we had the questing, quite often I would find my quest areas compromised by Alliance and have to send for help in order to get them to leave, it was great fun. Sure you sometimes were corpse camped but Azeroth was dangerous back then.

Sometimes we would be in Org discussing what we would be doing when 100 Alliance would storm through the gates to kill Thrall, it was just an amazing living thriving world, totally in the players control.

Now though it's totally different, the Cities are full but the towns and roads are empty. People don't need to leave their capital city, they can teleport everywhere like lemmings, striving to get gear but for what? So they can dual outside their City gates?

All over Azeroth the little towns and villages that attracted so much world PvP are now guarded with level 90 Guards. Instead we have to PvP either in the boring battlegrounds or try and find someone questing.

The trouble is why would anyone be questing now? They can level up in BG's and Dungeons without leaving the AH.

World PvP is the thing that brought immersion and it was immersion that brought the players and the players brought the money. If you look at a graph of the subscribers you will see a steady rise in Subs while wow was immersive during the Vanilla and BC times but then as WOTL arrived you will see it level off and then fall and it's falling fast now. This is because people left but more important, people left and told others how bad the game had become.

So lets talk solutions:

Blizzard need to swallow their pride, admit they got it wrong and give Azeroth back to the people.

Remove the following things:

All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.
Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth
Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages
Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly
Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads
Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).
Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.

Add the following things

All future expansions should take place in Azeroth, do not add any more zones, just develop the story on Azeroth so it thrives once again.

Conclusion

Ofc none of this will happen as the tears that would be shed could possibly flood the world and wipe us all out. The new breed of player has no balls, has no ability to shake him/herself down after being ganked and certainly has no patience to ride from A to B. Can you imagine the wow players of today trying to survive in Vanilla, they would have a heart attack at how hardcore it used to be. No I am afraid MMO's now are so easy, so spoon fed that the players today simply could not cope with old wow.

From a business point of view Blizzard are currently their own worst enemy, they are killing the game by making it so easy and forgiving. If they opened a BC server millions would return, but this would be an admission of doing it wrong and the PR department won't allow that

You're offering the same old solutions that people who played in vanilla always offer. You know what, every time that Bliz makes noises, even joke noises, about some of these things, the entirety of the response is negative.

I'll take them one at a time, though probably someone has done so already:

Remove ability to port to dungeons: Tried something sort of like this in the beginning of Cataclysm, where people had to fly to a dungeon before queing for it for the first time. Everyone hated it.

Remove flying from Azeroth: Various zones/areas don't have flying. People complain constantly about the ganking.

Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages: People who quest and have their quest zone killed off completely just quit playing, instead of doing whatever it is you suggest.

Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly: Cataclysm, again. I LOVED the heroics, people not in a guild, or in a casual/inactive guild, HATED them. Who do you think is quitting? casuals or hardcores? 1.3 million is not hardcores, it's casuals.

Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads: Wind riders, ok, not much problem there, graveyards? put traffic back on the roads? when you're dead? I don't see your point here.

Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).: Already not great participation in random bgs, due to the huge gear imbalance. I'm sure if you A: take away flying and B: make people run to them, more people will play them, right? right?

Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.: They worked on this, phasing is a lot better than it used to be back in wrath.

[jaymzkerten]

Growing huh, servers full in the EU? Have you logged in lately? As I'm typing this, there's currently 35 low populated servers, one "new players" and one "recommended" which means 37 low populated servers. My server is shrinking for every month that passes, people either transfer off it or quit entirely.

Whilst I agree that MoP is the best expansion since BC, they are definitely not growing in numbers.

Edit:
Oh and the servers I counted were only English speaking ones, if I were to include all the European ones we have an additional 19 German low populated ones, 3 French, 4 Spanish, 1 Russian, 1 Italian for a total sum of 65 low populated servers in Europe alone.

Low pop servers are just going to continue to get more and more vacant. Nothing is going to stop that. High pop servers are going to continue to get more and more crowded since people have the option to jump ship from their dying server, and especially now that you can even transfer an entire guild off to a more populated server to increase your recruitment pool.

As for the OP: to me this sounds less like "bring back immersion" and more like "bring back world PvP", because every one of those changes (save the difficult dungeon one) you want is directly linked to how easy it is to avoid world PvP for the non-PvPer.

And it has been said many, many, many times in the past; there is NOTHING immersive about "LF tank UBRS" for 2+ hours in trade.

[Conscious]

Completely agree. There is no community, no immersion, no "world" anymore.

They've turned this into a single player game.

Log on, queue up to instantely do anything in the game for an hour or two with a couple strangers, log off.

YOU WIN!

It's destroyed the game.

Yes. Despite GC's scolding of the community for their Anti CRZ stance, it is very much a single player game.

I think Blizzard is about to swallow their pride and change the Dev team around.

[notorious98]

If you read the WoW forums, all the casuals complain that the reason they are leaving is because Blizzard has made MoP too elitest like it was in Vanilla/BC. Gearing is too hard due to double and often triple gating (Golden Lotus Exalted to get Shado-Pan or August Celestials, in addition to gating with VP), no new 5 man dungeons in 5.2 giving 476 or 483 epics allowing access to ToT, too many dailies taking up too much time in order to gain rep and access to gear.

The official forums of most MMOs are not a very good barometer of the truth as opposed to loud, obnoxious hyperbole.

Here lies the problem: If they go back to the Vanilla/BC model casuals aren't happy; if they go back to the Wrath/Cata model hardcores aren't happy.

WoW had 11 million subscribers prior to WotLK's release. I'm not inclined to believe that time was filled with "hardcores".

---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 05:48 PM ----------

Remove flying from Azeroth: Various zones/areas don't have flying. People complain constantly about the ganking.

This is a joke, right? The only way you can be ganked is to play on a PvP server. Playing on a PvP server is supposed to introduce the danger of getting attacked at any moment. If you don't want to be ganked, you shouldn't be on a PvP server. That argument for keeping flying mounts around is quite possibly the dumbest. The only reason they should keep any of this shit is because Blizzard already implemented it and you can't just remove shit once you've brought it in. It's like asking a jury to disregard a statement made during a trial.

As for phasing in Wrath, there wasn't much of it. The real problem with phasing arrived in Cataclysm in places like Hyjal.

[Wafffles]

If I had a nickle for every person convinced the ideal version of WoW they invented in their head was the 'right' was WoW should be, I'd have a hell of a lot of nickles. And if Blizzard acquiesced to even a handful of them, the game would be an incoherent mess of contradictions subscribed to by - you guessed it! - that one person, and just about no one else.

WoW has made mistakes, but most of the decisions that have been made by Blizzard were the 'correct' decision to make the best game for the majority of players. Now might it have been foolish to give in to popular demand in certain cases? In hind sight, of course, but no one knows at the time of implementation which decision is the silly one and which is the successful one. For example, if I told you a month before the BC release that flying mounts were going to become a major point of contention, almost every player would have scoffed at me for being a Blizzard hater. And you know what? They'd have been right! Flying mounts were a logical addition, and a fairly successful one, until the implementation guided subsequent content such as the Cataclysm revamp.

Basically the conclusion to take away is that WoW has always been, and will be until the last server goes down, a massive experiment. The things we love most in this game were a result of trial and error, and the things we've come to hate about this game are, well, examples of some of those errors. To suggest that you know best how to do a top to bottom overhaul isn't just foolish, and it isn't just egocentric, it's also attempting to take credit for realizations that have been a decade in the making thanks to countless hours of Blizzard developers. What you're doing with this thread (and everyone else who makes threads like these) is akin to saying the last word in someone else's sentence and trying to assert that you totally had that idea all along. Blizzard knows this game has weak links, everyone in the community knows this game has weak links, but it's a lot more complicated than just deleting this, swallowing pride on that, and bazing perfect game!

[Seranthor]

Blizzard doesn't swallow. Blizzard spits (all over its fanbase).

Then teach them a lesson with your wallet... if you already have then you need to consider asking yourself why you are stalking your ex-game.

[Thirtyrock]

The official forums of most MMOs are not a very good barometer of the truth as opposed to loud, obnoxious hyperbole.



WoW had 11 million subscribers prior to WotLK's release. I'm not inclined to believe that time was filled with "hardcores".

---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 05:48 PM ----------



This is a joke, right? The only way you can be ganked is to play on a PvP server. Playing on a PvP server is supposed to introduce the danger of getting attacked at any moment. If you don't want to be ganked, you shouldn't be on a PvP server. That argument for keeping flying mounts around is quite possibly the dumbest. The only reason they should keep any of this shit is because Blizzard already implemented it and you can't just remove shit once you've brought it in. It's like asking a jury to disregard a statement made during a trial.

As for phasing in Wrath, there wasn't much of it. The real problem with phasing arrived in Cataclysm in places like Hyjal.

A lot of people started to play on PVP servers after flying was a thing, now that it's not in some areas they are qqing loudly. I get that it's part of it, and I accept it (I'm on Kil'Jaeden US, which is PVP) but that doesn't mean people don't complain. People complain, and then quit, or quit and then complain. either way, "casuals" HATE this aspect of Isle of thunder.

Remember, we're talking about why/when people leave, right now it's casuals, en masse, since I doubt there are 1.3 million hardcores in the world.

Phasing in Wrath, you ever complete the argent quests and then try to summon at ICC? That's where it was the worst and caused the most problems.

[Very Tired]

You seem to be confusing what Blizzard should do, with what I want them to do.

[Statix]

Remove the following things:

All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.
Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth
Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages
Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly
Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads
Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).
Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.

Add the following things

All future expansions should take place in Azeroth, do not add any more zones, just develop the story on Azeroth so it thrives once again.

No. A big, fat 100% absolute, motherf**king hell no. Those aspects of the game made the game better. It's obvious you are one of those lousy low level character gankers, otherwise you wouldn't be whining about high level guards in low level towns and villages. Leveling alts is already a pain in the ass and you wanna remove flight paths and graveyards? Man, gtfo.

All future expansions should take place in Azeroth. They did that in Cataclysm and that worked out so well, didn't it?

The decline is WoW subcribers is mostly in Asia, which isn't all that surprising. All the shit you see in the game, they live in a real world like that. Would you wanna play a game that is almost exactly as your real life is? No.

Dailies aren't helping, but the real problem is the fact that you have to do them to gain reputation with certain factions. Bring back rep tabards. Bring back an awesome story. Don't introduce boring characters such as Deathwing. Blizzard is simply milking the cow, they are adding extra expansions into the mix because they see $ signs. But alas, the community isn't falling for it. AND FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, stop bringing old instances to the maximum level. All Blizzard is doing, is giving us less new stuff. Look at how much instances there were throughout WotLK. Look how unique and new they were. Instead in Cataclysm we get Deadmines and Shadowfang Keep at level 85. Give me a break.

Blizzard just puts less and less effort into creating new stuff. Who cares if we can do Deadmines again? I want new Dungeons that play into the story, like Utgarde, where the Lich King appears and empowers a boss. Wanna bring back an old instance? Put a new story in it, like Naxxramas.

WotLK did, as I recall, everything right. Cataslysm was just bad. Mists of Pandaria is a lot better on a lot of fronts, but also continues the decline by introducing 463453452 dailies we have to do each day for rep. Blizzard is, I've said it before, just milking us. They don't give us a lot of unique content, no, they make us farm 32423 dailies every day for rep so they keep getting paid without actually having given us something awesome in return. Blizzard is doing this more and more.

What Blizzard needs to do is stop dumbing the game down, needs to introduce another epic story and, above all else, needs to stop with bringing old content back. Bring back the WoW as it was in WotLK.

[Viradiance]

Front page states casuals aren't able to play because it's all catchup and takes so much time dedication.

So obviously we need to butcher the game for them! Yeah, that'll help to keep WoW's largest customer base happy.

[soulyouth]

reading the OP this is the strong feeling I get



I have been playing since July 06 and everything they have done has made the game better, people need to learn nothing stays the same and accept changes.

[Theendgamelv3]

Cata was a total Bullsh*t expansion. The only thing I liked there was Hard dungeons. People left not because of Dungeons because of bad contempt and bad lore introducing, least motivation in game. This game was SO Dull back then.

Yet Blizzard has stated themselves that a lot of people playing the game found those dungeons too hard.

Dont compare this two Azeroth. World PvP is dead today. Not to mention 90 LVL jerks killing low level guys gazillion times until they Rage quit (low level). Thats why Flying mounts must removed from Azeroth.

World PVP is world player vs player. When a lvl 90 ganks a lvl 10, it is a lvl 90 vs a lvl 10 in the world. It is considered world pvp. Also you talk about lvl 90 jerks, what stopped lvl 85, 80,70 and 60 jerks from ganking in the past? Nothing stopped them as well.

Its just Raiding when you have to leave your city with FLYING MOUNT no one can catch you. I wont fave clash with other faction. In the end you safely enter Raid portal. -1 to World PvP. Pet gathering is same you use Flying mount. And not all people gather pets just small scale of players. I dont know what happens when you are playing Pet battle, Does your character disappears ? Or if someone attacks battle is canceled and you enter they pvp fray?
So we are mostly safe in Azeroth. Its all because Flying mounts.

This has little to nothing to what I quoted. You talk about flying mounts this and flying mounts that. You can't use a flying mount for 65 levels in the game, 1-60 and 85-90. On top of that you can't use a flying mount in the Isle of Thunder. It is funny you talk about you won't have your favorite clash with the opposite faction yet have you done dailies in MoP? They kinda encourage world PVP. It forced players in both factions together. I have done more world pvp in MoP than I ever have in this game. Also, on Kil'Jaeden there was still world pvp at xroads and this was before CRZs and this was during Cata. It goes to show that it is the players who have to do this and not just Blizzard.

90 level non-visible Guards say Hi when you attack Village.

You are telling me there are invisible guards that attack you?

I have never seen big and interesting World PvP in MoP. There was two occasions : First when MoP was released there was some EPIC battles between Horde and Alliance. When there where tones of guys leveling without Flying mounts and they Had to encounter them. It started 2vs3 and ended like 10 vs 10 or even more and I was so thrilled in the Begining of MoP. and second occasion was when Ilse of Thunder opened - it was total bloodbath reason again - No flying mounts.

Your first two sentences contradict each other. You say you never seen big interesting world pvp in MoP and then you named 2 occasions. While I never fought on 10v10 or something like that, I do know that I have been in more than a few fights. You said no flying mounts why is it that Isle of Thunder, a place that you HAVE to go to do dailies and go to the ToT raid if you raid normals and heroics and it doesn't have more pvp? No flying mounts right? It is on the players. Isle of Thunder is the perfect world pvp ground, yet you talk about one occasion of world pvp there. On my hunter this expansion I play Ally on a horde dominated server. I had to play cat and mouse on more than one occasion.

This is the main problem that made World PVP die. What I mean is that when you are on your flying mount you are safe ! You know whoever will encounter you, you can ALWAYS escape and end the PVP. When someone attacks you you go invisible or vanish, Heroic Leap or something that will take you OUT of combat, use Flying mount and you are safe.
Blizzard should Allow flying mounts on PVE realms only because in PVE realms you dont really care for PVP and use this flying mounts to reach certain places and level up proffs. And they shouldnt allow Cross realm within PVE and PVP realms.

To remove them and all the other problems will be fixed. World PVP once more will have its old thrill. When you will have to Walk in Dungeon. You will surely encounter someone in way like it was in MoP until 90 lvl and used Non-flying mounts. Though I dont think that removing LFBG will change something, all battlemasters are in cities !

Why, why does world pvp have to be high level. All this talk of flying mounts is stupid cause everyone level 59 and under can't fly. Just how many 90s are in the outdated zones? My solution for the 1-60 content is only have CRZs available for lower players only. This way you won't have a high lvl player coming in and ganking everyone. This way you only have low level ally and horde grouped together in the area and they can't fly. If they don't fight each other, as I said it, it is on the players. I know you will say what about 60-85, well there is already a item that dismounts players but it is a rare drop. Without taking out flying, they should make another item similar to the item you used in Twilight Highlands daily where you dismount flying NPCs and dragged them towards you. This would solve the flying mount problem without taking away flying mounts. Taking away flying mounts might increase world pvp, but will make leveling a lot longer and leveling up professions a pain and that in turn effects the economy on your sever. I would hate to have no flying on a low pop server cause things would be more expensive as there would be less supply.

[Conscious]

reading the OP this is the strong feeling I get



I have been playing since July 06 and everything they have done has made the game better, people need to learn nothing stays the same and accept changes.

Subscription numbers don't reflect your sweeping claim.

[Thirtyrock]

Front page states casuals aren't able to play because it's all catchup and takes so much time dedication.

So obviously we need to butcher the game for them! Yeah, that'll help to keep WoW's largest customer base happy.

This is exactly the case. If we want a game with just a few hundred thousand hard cores across the world, we'll follow the OPs advice.

[soulyouth]

Subscription numbers don't reflect your sweeping claim.

people need to learn nothing stays the same and accept changes.

People move on, find something new, there is still millions of people playing the game, I have no idea why wow has this following of X players trying to convince people that the game is dead/bad/outdated and there needs to be huge changes.

They just need to move on, you no longer enjoy the game, enjoy your memory's of the good times you have and play something else

[MrWolly]

The only thing I somewhat agree with is the level 90 guard problem. It's kind of annoying when you walk by a place of the opposite faction and their guards one-shot your alt. There is also the problem of not being able to enter bases to kill your. Before, if someone ran into town, I'd run in after them and take them out. Now, you can't do that. The guards should scale by zone level and by the level of the attacker. IE: Default guard level for Thrallmar Guards (Level 60), but if someone of a higher level attacks, higher level guards should spawn whether they are level 60, 70, 80, etc.

[Thirtyrock]

Yet Blizzard has stated themselves that a lot of people playing the game found those dungeons too hard.



World PVP is world player vs player. When a lvl 90 ganks a lvl 10, it is a lvl 90 vs a lvl 10 in the world. It is considered world pvp. Also you talk about lvl 90 jerks, what stopped lvl 85, 80,70 and 60 jerks from ganking in the past? Nothing stopped them as well.



This has little to nothing to what I quoted. You talk about flying mounts this and flying mounts that. You can't use a flying mount for 65 levels in the game, 1-60 and 85-90. On top of that you can't use a flying mount in the Isle of Thunder. It is funny you talk about you won't have your favorite clash with the opposite faction yet have you done dailies in MoP? They kinda encourage world PVP. It forced players in both factions together. I have done more world pvp in MoP than I ever have in this game. Also, on Kil'Jaeden there was still world pvp at xroads and this was before CRZs and this was during Cata. It goes to show that it is the players who have to do this and not just Blizzard.


You are telling me there are invisible guards that attack you?



Your first two sentences contradict each other. You say you never seen big interesting world pvp in MoP and then you named 2 occasions. While I never fought on 10v10 or something like that, I do know that I have been in more than a few fights. You said no flying mounts why is it that Isle of Thunder, a place that you HAVE to go to do dailies and go to the ToT raid if you raid normals and heroics and it doesn't have more pvp? No flying mounts right? It is on the players. Isle of Thunder is the perfect world pvp ground, yet you talk about one occasion of world pvp there. On my hunter this expansion I play Ally on a horde dominated server. I had to play cat and mouse on more than one occasion.


Why, why does world pvp have to be high level. All this talk of flying mounts is stupid cause everyone level 59 and under can't fly. Just how many 90s are in the outdated zones? My solution for the 1-60 content is only have CRZs available for lower players only. This way you won't have a high lvl player coming in and ganking everyone. This way you only have low level ally and horde grouped together in the area and they can't fly. If they don't fight each other, as I said it, it is on the players. I know you will say what about 60-85, well there is already a item that dismounts players but it is a rare drop. Without taking out flying, they should make another item similar to the item you used in Twilight Highlands daily where you dismount flying NPCs and dragged them towards you. This would solve the flying mount problem without taking away flying mounts. Taking away flying mounts might increase world pvp, but will make leveling a lot longer and leveling up professions a pain and that in turn effects the economy on your sever. I would hate to have no flying on a low pop server cause things would be more expensive as there would be less supply.

Well said my friend.

[Mr. Casual]

some of your ideas sound good and the general theme of immersion is spot on but i hate having to give up QoL stuff to get it. Walking for like 15 min to get to an area or waiting for people to get to dungeons is a absolute pain. As much fun as world pvp sounds/ was I just dont see enough people willing to come help and imagine all the dailies that would never get done because the constant fighting on servers, especially since dailies have become so important and linked to pve gear progression that doesnt seem too good