Well, if you turned all that stuff off on PvP realms, it might encourage/require some well-known PvE guilds to move off the PvP servers, which would help with the population problems.
So, I guess, it's a good idea?
I totally agree that this accounts for some departures. I'd also point out that most of the departures according to their press release were in asia, and things relating to that locale probably has a fair amount to do with it as well, rather than necessarily this or that design decision by Blizz.
Add meaningful group play to it and I'd also come back for sure. The immersion in WotLK wasn't so bad to be perfectly honest but they way they handled playing with others really sucked the fun out of the game for me. Yes you can still do that of course, either on the very hardcore level or when PuGing but the first is not for everyone, it's too stressful and requires too much commitment while the other either has no cooperation at all or you you can do everything faster and get bigger rewards on your own so it's really discouraging to play with anyone if they just drag you down. For me it just lead to doing things on my own and using the guild chat and ventrilo.. then I just realized why not just cut out the middleman and save some money too. I can talk and message just as well outside the game than in it.
You dredge up a few great points and solutions, but there are a few problems.
All ability to teleport to Dungeons, Make everyone ride there.
Why not, makes sense to me.
Remove Flying mounts from Azeroth
Absolutely, plus the fps rate will greatly improve.
Remove all high level guards from low level towns and villages
Not such a great idea, if you do this idiots will constantly kill all the questgivers and that will discourage levelers and new players.
Buff Dungeons so that you actually need to play your class properly
The problem at lower lvls isn't that the dungeons are too easy, the problem is "heirloom" is way too good. Why not set up three modes of diffucult for each dungeon? This way the casuals can have easy mode and the hardcore can do their thing too.
Remove at least 50% of wind riders and graveyards, get the traffic back on the roads
Bad idea, who wants to spend 15 mins of their precious time riding to a spot, it's just plain dumb and a lot of other games have done away this as well.
Remove Ability to teleport into Battlegrounds, make us go to battlemasters as in the old days (just make more of them to avoid griefers).
Not a bad idea.
Remove a lot of phasing as it ruins immersion when you chase someone and they suddenly vanish.
I think phasing helps with the immersion of the game, so I disagree. And who are you chasing a lvl 45 warrior? I mean seriously.
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.
Excellent idea!!!
The problem with implenting a lot of your "great" ideas is fixing the inequities first. There are PVP servers with a horde to ally ration of 18:1, this is more the norm than the exception. Who the hell wants to get their teeth kicked in 24/7 just to do a dungeon/raid or bg, people will stop playing the game in droves. Xferring is not the solution either, who wants to piss away $200 xferring toons to another server which may eventually have the same problem. Your solutions are dead on the money - CORRECT, but other things need to be solved before your good ideas can be implemented.
The bottom line is, free to play games offer competitive value to the consumer. I, for one, dont feel $15 a month is a lot of money or unfair, but a lot of people do apparently and Blizzard either needs to either rethink their business or provide more for their customers.
Last edited by Luxeley; 2013-05-09 at 08:17 PM.
Rose-tinted glasses. They don't like how the game is now so they refuse to accept that the game is doing fine right now. Yes, they lost a huge number of subscribers this quarter, most of them from asia. The game still has 2-3x the subscriber base of any other subscription MMO out there. The game is not dying, the game does not need to be 'saved'.
When was the last time you heard someone say: "Man, I wish they never added additional graveyards or flight paths"
Like, do you think people sitting on the sidelines are going to hop back in when they read "Removed half of all existing flight paths and graveyards. Enjoy your corpse runs!" in the patch notes?
I don't really agree with the want for battlemasters. On one hand, you want people out and in the world, right? so why make all the PVP'er have to camp around the battlemasters in Org,SW,IF,Etc so they can requeue when they get back from their queue pop.
I don't think you're going to be able to get flying mounts out of azeroth anytime soon. Take solace in that they stand strong on the stance that you wont be flying in pandaria until level cap.
I can half agree that we need a harder difficulty of dungeon, though. Cata dungeons were hard in difficulty, but they were also pretty long in some cases (WC, SFK, HoO, Etc.) I wouldn't mind a hard, but short instance, like halls of reflection. This was doubled by the fact that in pre-raid gear, healers were pretty fucking terrible off the get-go in cata.
Compared to the difficulty of MoP heroics, where you can brainlessly pull the instance with little concern, I would say that there's room for another difficulty. Should go back to the regs->heroics easy/hard model of TBC.
I don't think the issue is solely quality of life, but more in delivery of content.
Scenarios were too easy, Inconsistent in length, and punishing if you have a lack of solid DPS.
Heroics were too easy. There was no other difficulty.
Dailies were heavily emphasised as a means of progression (Which is great, if you happen to like dailies) by gating VP rewards.
LFR was pretty hit and miss.
Normal had obscene difficulty spikes at launch, causing a lot of modest guilds to get stonewalled on fights like Elegon, Garalon.
The sheer leveling curve and need for rep cock-blocked a lot of alt-players who were living it up in cataclysm.
Additionally.
I don't think they'll open a classic/TBC/WLK server. Ever. Nobody wants to run sunwell/ICC/Classic Naxx for more than a couple years. While I think they would have some popularity for the first while, once people realize they'll never get new content, they'll start to leave.
I don't know what game you're playing, but I get tons of world PvP in Pandaria, as well as when I'm leveling alts (thanks to CRZ)
ps. your solutions are bogus
0/10. Complete shit suggestions. If you really want vanilla wow/ BC again, may I suggest finding a private server for your needs? (Am i allowed to say that?)
Another elitist player; nothing to see here.
Oh, I would hardly say it was the "rehashed" content that turned people off to Cataclysm as opposed to the lack of content and general mediocrity of said content. In fact, I'd say the overall difficulty of heroics at launch had more of an effect on sub losses than rehashed content.
---------- Post added 2013-05-09 at 04:38 PM ----------
So, how many other subscription MMOs are out there? 2 (Rift and Eve)? It's not about how many subscribers they have. The better barometer is how much money are they pulling in per month around said game. That's not exactly something we can gauge since many F2P MMO companies don't need to report their revenue. As it is, saying they have so many more subscribers than other subscription MMOs is short sighted considering sub MMOs only make up 1-2% of the MMO market as a whole.
That won't happen simply because Vanilla/BC servers will shoot to the top of most populated servers list in a few weeks if not days. Can you imagine what an embarrassment it will be for Blizzard when several years old versions of WoW kick the ass of the latest version?
It will be Blizzard's admission that they screwed up big time. So, don't hold your breath. I can only imagine it happening if the sub numbers drop horribly and they cannot come up with other ways to make up for the income deficit, since money > pride.
You definitely got that right. I don't think of myself as a casual gamer back when I played WOW but I do know this. I hated flying was taken away even for the leveling process. It was something you earned in game and suddenly it was banned from you. Doesn't matter the reason or how blizzard wanted to slow players down.
It was one of my top 10 reason listed for leaving wow.
I am highly sympathetic to the OP's suggestions. The difference between flying over a zone, and actually being among the creatures, dangers and others in the zone is tremendous. If you're skeptical, fly over the Jade Forest in Pandaria, or even Feralas, and then ride back on the ground. The difference is immense.
What's done is done, no way back. But the future MMOs need to be like what WOW was, not like it's now. Or unlike WOW at all.
The QoL changes should have never come, yet now we're too much dependant on them
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.
Yeah, I've been playing since Vanilla, and I would hate almost every single one of the OP's ideas if they were implemented.
Remove teleports to dungeons? I play a warlock, and I know what this would cause. Everyone to sit in SW or wherever and wait for me to get there so that I could summon them. People do that shit NOW, when it's easy as hell to get places. Only way I would even consider this is if they ditched summoning as well.
Removing flying mounts from Azeroth--why? So that when you're max level you still have to spend minutes riding in boredom to get to where you're going? I don't have a problem forbidding flight until you're past that content, but once that happens, then fly away. Also with removing flight plans. I might agree that there are too many of them now, but there were way way too few back in Vanilla.
Guards? I don't PVP, so I don't really care about this one. Teleporting into BGs either, by extension, though I think it also falls into the same situation as with dungeons, above.
Buffing dungeons? I don't understand why people feel that they need to close off accessibility to people who don't reach their arbitrary level of "skill." It's a game, and games should be fun. Granted, steamrolling content isn't always fun either, I can accept that side of the argument and even support it. For example, I have a friend who used to play. He was an OTR truck driver, so he couldn't play at any time and place that he felt like. He didn't care about researching optimal talent builds, ability rotations, and so on. I play on a more-or-less nightly basis. I try to be as good as I possibly can to help my raid group progress. My friend was never going to be as "skilled" as I am at the game. From the arguments that I keep hearing, he shouldn't be allowed to do anything in the game. I call bullshit on this one.
Phasing, IMO, actually improves immersion, though I don't think that's the word you really mean to use here. Now the world changes along with you. You accomplish something, and the world reflects that. You are now an active part of the world.
The OP early in his post made a comment about the game being in the players' control. Turns out that the players have exercised that control in making and supporting the choices given to them. None of this was crammed down our throats by Blizzard, saying that we will do these things or else. At least if you're going to be upset about things, direct it at the right people.