Why was World of Warcraft dumbed down that much?

[xixixviixiiii]

Video game or not. What is the % of people that finish hard modes?

Somewhere around 0.05% of the players, I think? Which is low, no doubt, but when put in perspective, only like 2% of the players even finished normal so it's really not that bad. Most people really don't care about heroic mode at all. These numbers could be wrong (I'm pulling them from memory based on stuff other people posted) but it seems fairly reasonable in my mind.

[Coronius]

I like the simplicity of WoW. It's one of the reasons I loved this game from the moment I set foot in Azeroth, in early 2005.

What bothers me is that Blizzard has taken away one of the other aspects I loved; The social one. It's a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG where you don't even have to, or barely even get the chance to interact with other players. It's basically a singleplayer game in a world made for huge amounts of people.

All of my old friends have quit the game, and nowadays I have no choice but to play alone. Call me pathetic, but this is how it is. Sure, I've jumped between a few guilds every now and then but since nothing in the game requires or even promotes teamwork, the guild is nothing more than a glorified chatroom to hang in while you do your dailies all by yourself.
Don't get me wrong, MoP is a good expansion. The raids have been amazing this far, and I love the environments in Pandaria. That isn't the problem however, the problem is that you have no one to enjoy these things with anymore.

Rose-tinted goggles and expansion nostalgia aside, but I miss having to talk to other players to set something up. Be it raids, groups or even events. I miss faction- and server rivalry, and even the guild rivalry. I miss the sense of community. Group quests were awesome too. All of this is slowly being removed from the game, and it's frankly making me sad. Nothing you do seems to matter anymore, you just log in and do your dailies and maybe a LFR or two where no one says 2 words during the entire run, before logging out.

Meh, maybe it's just me.

[Pengalor]

I like the simplicity of WoW. It's one of the reasons I loved this game from the moment I set foot in Azeroth, in early 2005.

What bothers me is that Blizzard has taken away one of the other elements I loved; The social one. It's a Massively Multiplayer Online RPG where you don't even have to, or barely even get the chance to interact with other players. It's basically a singleplayer game in a world made for big crowds of people.

All of my old friends have quit the game, and nowadays I have no choice but to play alone. Call me pathetic, but this is how it is. Sure, I've jumped between a few guilds every now and then but since nothing in the game requires or even promotes teamwork, the guild is nothing more than a glorified chatroom to hang in while you do your dailies all by yourself.

Blizz didn't remove it, it degraded on it's own. Like I said in an earlier post, it's a sad side-effect of popularity. You get a huge influx of people and many of them had never played an MMO, many of them were younger/less mature, the community just slowly degraded and as such the people who were normally social became less so because interactions were generally negative.

[Rexxr]

Simply put if lower the learning curve, than more people will want and try to play.

[Anjerith]

World of Warcraft has always been marketed as a Streamlined and Easy-to-learn game. That is why it had such a huge impact on a world where you previously had a limited amount of weight you could carry, which included food - which you had to eat. Honestly, I can't think up a better reason for why WoW has done so well other than that.

I am sure anyone who knows about Iron Rations knows what I am saying here.


Also, the social aspect of the game still exists. You are just seeing people that NEVER wanted to be social now having a chance to avoid it.

[Duronos]

World of Warcraft has always been marketed as a Streamlined and Easy-to-learn game. That is why it had such a huge impact on a world where you previously had a limited amount of weight you could carry, which included food - which you had to eat. Honestly, I can't think up a better reason for why WoW has done so well other than that.

I am sure anyone who knows about Iron Rations knows what I am saying here.


Also, the social aspect of the game still exists. You are just seeing people that NEVER wanted to be social now having a chance to avoid it.

I wouldn't say streamlined initially but I don't think you were necessarily using the word streamlined in the same context I'm thinking.

[Arewn]

Bosses have gotten harder and more complex since vanilla/TBC, where they were at large tank and spank, the hardest things about bosses back then was getting all 40 of your members into decent gear/attuned/res gear, and then get all 40 of them to not afk long enough to make a pull. In TBC this progressively changed, but ultimately these problems remained and leveling and gearing your raiders and alts was not very accessible, it took a long time/grind.
In regards to content difficulty, Blizzard has made things harder, but addons and player learning resources have made things a lot easier.

Content accessibility and stream-lining is where we want to look in regards to Blizzard "dumbing things down". In some areas this has been good, you don't have to go through such ridiculous grind just to be able to raid anymore, and there's multiple difficulties for raids to accommodate different player types. On the other hand they've flooded the game with dailies which stream-line player activity and pump extra gold into the economy which causes huge inflation, they've stream-line so much that in combination with addons player have become 'spoiled' and lazy, LF tools are useful but cause some community degradation and complacency, etc.

[Destruktion]

Blizz didn't remove it, it degraded on it's own. Like I said in an earlier post, it's a sad side-effect of popularity. You get a huge influx of people and many of them had never played an MMO, many of them were younger/less mature, the community just slowly degraded and as such the people who were normally social became less so because interactions were generally negative.

This.
This has been the case with nearly EVERY online game to some extent. Some games suffer only a bit because of their niche-appeal (like EQ, Eve, etc), while others like WoW are completely ruined.
The first MMO I ever played used to be full of English-speakers and players who formed communities. Presently, that MMO has been completely engulfed by the BR horde.

I don't have much to say on the subject of WoW being dumbed-down, except that it undoubtedly has been dumbed-down in all aspects except for raiding and class/talent customization over the course of its lifetime. Whether or not that was good for the game is up for debate.

[artemishunter1]

Just another one of those nonsense threads.

WoW wasn't "dumbed down" one bit. The challenging content of the game is more complex and demanding than it has ever been. You probably also write complaint mails to your local supermarket because they offer various ice cream flavors instead just the one you prefer.

1)leveling is dumbed down. It is streamlined, low level monsters can't kill you now. Elites have been removed.
2)hunter pets are glorified dps. Pet interaction mechanics no longer mean anything, and every pet can be any type, and share your stats, rather than having their own stats. Gotta catchem up is meaningless as all special spirit beast have the saem ability.
3) death of hybrid specs. You could actually pick talents from all three specs (meaningful talents or they would have been cookie cutter to begin with).
4)instances were difficult and complex. You could get lost in BRD.
5)Rogue poison making, picklocking, and pickpocketing skill were actually useful.
6)world itself had treasure chests, that gave meaningful reward for its zone.
7)epic alteric valley

[Stabbs]

Heaven forbid if we're sent underwater without water breathing and the ability to walk on the sea floor.

Keep on "streamlining," Blizzard!

[Teokis]

If you're referring to things like them removing the wood cost from making a campfire, that's not making the game easier. That is making the game less tedious/annoying.

[Resentful]

I come back to this thread and the OP still hasn't linked his armory

-.-

[StationaryHawk]

I'm finding it somewhat odd that the removal of the need to visit your class trainer for an ability has also removed the desire to earn spells later in the spellbook. As if reaching the level required for them was not the journey, but rather the trip to your faction's city after doing so. I'm also finding it hard to believe that you were one of the people who did the math behind the old talents in order to find the optimal build, and not one of the people who simply looked up what it was on the internet.

With the exception of the larger, complicated dungeons such as Dire Maul and Blackrock, dungeons have always been pretty straight forward from what I recall. Maps certainly made them easier to navigate, but by the time they were added the game was old enough that the "Go here for this boss, and this one, and this one, and this one" mentality was already present among players.

LFR hasn't "dumbed down" your normal and heroic modes at all. Stick to those.

[rasako]

Leveling was changed because most people never reached the cap, coupled with actual raiders complaining how long it took for their friends to catch up with them.

I can agree that the damage done to leveling is pretty bad in a lot of ways.

The auto-learning of spells and stuff is just a quality of life things, I think most people don't care all too much about that except perhaps RPers and the few stalwart oldschoolers.

The talent tree thing is because no real choice ever existed in talent trees. In some cases, it still doesn't :x

But a lot of the other things you complain about were very necessary and were long overdue, like queue systems for types of content, considering how historically low their participation is combined with how much it costs to produce.

But I doubt you'll ever agree with anything sort of going that way, considering how many slurs you used in your statements :x


But anyways, to sum it up, in general, queue systems, drop in drop out, no commitment is where gaming is now. It's where it has been heading since 2005, and it's firmly in there now. It's why most new MMO's have major problems getting anyone to give them the time of day, and why old games still around mostly are seeing dwindling numbers. The gaming landscape has changed, and MMOs aren't really going along with it, and it's carrying a whole lot of genre baggage, and lots of people can "scratch that itch" that MMO-type games usually provide via something that has either no monthly fee, or is free entirely, without all the baggage. At least that's what I think.

the BIGGEST problem with the entire gaming community is just that. nobody CARES about the "MMO" part of MMO games anymore. Everyone wants a singleplayer experience in every game they play. This game was designed to be a social environment where you meet players and have fun. now I can play the entire game by myself or with one friend and NEVER run out of things to do. the only "MMO" part of the game left is that there's a bunch of people in the same capital city as you, and then you hardly come into contact with anyone after that for more than 10 minutes

[Glorious Leader]

the BIGGEST problem with the entire gaming community is just that. nobody CARES about the "MMO" part of MMO games anymore. Everyone wants a singleplayer experience in every game they play. This game was designed to be a social environment where you meet players and have fun. now I can play the entire game by myself or with one friend and NEVER run out of things to do. the only "MMO" part of the game left is that there's a bunch of people in the same capital city as you, and then you hardly come into contact with anyone after that for more than 10 minutes

I think by and large people are still interested in the social aspect of the game, otherwise they could really just buy a single player game. that part of the mmo experience i think still has appeal to players of all skill lvl. What I don't think has appeal (in so far as relating to the mmo part) is the grinds and gates to their progression. I don't think dailies and rng lfr have appeal because they go from 1-90 pretty smoothly with lots of progression and then at lvl 90 it comes to a screeching halt.

[melodramocracy]

I come back to this thread and the OP still hasn't linked his armory

-.-

Nor should he need to. Less than 5% of a games content being hard doesn't make the game itself difficult.

[mvaliz]

Nor should he need to. Less than 5% of a games content being hard doesn't make the game itself difficult.

So... you and the OP want the WHOLE game to be difficult? Why?

He/she CLAIMS they like challenge, and yet the game HAS that challenge! If they haven't beaten all that - then there's no reason to put MORE challenging things in there, is there?

They can go and have their challenge modes and heroic raids all they want while the majority get the casual content which is designed to not just be repeating the same content over and over again because it's not about challenge, it's about visual/story stimulus. What exactly is the problem?

Is it that the normal game isn't "training" other people up to heroic/challenge standards? Why should it? It's a video game you play for fun... not a military training camp where lives and societies are dependent on split-second actions. Hell man, even the MILITARY doesn't train its people by dropping them in live combat zones telling them "OK - go learn!" :P

If he's so worried about having hardcore players, how about he offers to TRAIN people how to do it?

What's that? He shouldn't have to? Well, now who's acting like the so-called "Self-entitled" fool? :P

[Deleted]

Nor should he need to. Less than 5% of a games content being hard doesn't make the game itself difficult.

where does the 5% percentage come from?
questing = easy
raiding = easy/medium/hard modes
dungeon = easy/hard modes
scenarios = easy/medium modes
brawlers guid = various levels of difficulty, hard on later ranks with lower gear
pvp = depends on other players, can be really hard at higher ratings

[Xargoth6634]

You cry a lot.

[Deleted]

"Swagster"

Stopped reading right there.