Less is more, why WoW isn't what it used to be.

[Syran]

You clearly don't play on my realm.
Also, travelling to the damn stone is the issue. Only to have someone run away at the first wipe, HSing back to town, looking for another player, then have someone else quit in the meantime etc... etc...
I did that during all of BC, I'm not going back, sorry.

It's not about individual negative experiences (we all had them, more or less), it's about how much LFD takes away from the potential social opportunities that never occur because of it. If grouping would really be such a chore people would be leaving in droves as soon as the novelty of vanilla wore off, but they didn't, even though there was hardly any other content in the game. My other post:

The obliviousness of people to the importance of social interaction (rivalries, friendships, people you look up to, people you want to gank all day every day, ...) is astounding. It's like the fame, the very premise of this game wasn't built on it. The convenience took a lot of this away, it isn't good, it can't be good for a long term survival of the game where player bonding is one of the strongest aspects which keeps people playing and subscribed.

[Deleted]

Gotta disagree.... I think the community just wants stuff.... easier, now lol. I remember in PvP people thought it was normal for stuff to having ratings requirements, and that you shouldn't be able to buy a full set of stuff with just honor... the argument was "well do you want guys that bot to get a full set of gear?" Now guys that bot can get a full set of regular gear as well as elite gear, nobody seems to mind lol.

Or if there's a boss that isn't one shottable - people will literally go on the forums and complain and threaten to quit, like Garalon or Lei Shen. I really can't remember seeing that stuff happen back in the day. Sure some of the stuff was the same, such as "nerf x class, and buff my class", I think the big difference now though is the community doesn't really want anything challenging in the game, at least a very large part of it.

Erhm, I'm not sure why you disagree here...

Naturally it's not the same things they whine about today, the game has changed, so it's other things now. But I didn't specify that they complain about the same things, just that they complained just as much in the beginning, as they do now

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It's not about individual negative experiences (we all had them, more or less), it's about how much LFD takes away from the potential social opportunities that never occur because of it. If grouping would really be such a chore people would be leaving in droves as soon as the novelty of vanilla wore off, but they didn't, even though there was hardly any other content in the game. My other post:

In your opinion

I've played on and off since the very beginning, and I'm at a point where I just want to play with RL friends. I'm not looking for new friendships, so LFD and LFR suits me just fine.

If it wasn't for LFD and LFR I'd probable quit (again) sooner than later. No doubt I'll quit again sometime in the future, but it won't be because of LFD or LFR, on the contrary!

[Azutael]

For me the biggest issue WoW has, is the community. But that's largely our own fault. And as long as there's no real punishment to being one of those toxic players, then not much will change.

- LFD is one of the best features ever added, it allows you to play when you want to. Not waste time spamming chat forever to get a group that might be just as crap as any LFD group.

- Flying mounts is another huge time saver, and for me it made exploring the world even more fun. You can still use your ground mount if you like, I do so myself from time to time, it adds another perspective when exploring zones. then later I can explore the same zone from the air, which is great.

- Heroic modes I don't really care about, but at least it opened raiding for more people. With having more difficulties, which is nice.

- LFR, see above. It is too simple, but with flex raiding coming I don't see it ever changing. It will likely replace dungeons somewhat, which is a shame.

-

The World is Evolving while World of Warcraft is not.

Not going to happen anytime soon, blizzard is a business after all. And business is still good, so why change the payment model ?
However, if it keeps going downhill, they will have to make changes. That is obvious.

- Dailies are awful, and I hope we get less and less of them in the future. Barrens and timeless isle is a start.

[Deleted]

LFD, This ruined the ability of everyone running to a dungeon, meeting up with a bunch of people and fighting opposing factions.
"Stand's waiting, then all of an sudden a Undead Warlock comes with a group of friends. You try to survive until your friends arrive, then fight them or run into the instance because you're scared." This engaged epic world pvp and allowed people in the world.

Nothings changed since vanilla, it would be one or two people run to the dungeon, then summon the rest, Any world PVP that happened was on a PVP server, and guess what ? not everyone plays on a PVP server. LFD is a fantastic tool to allow people to quickly find a group and do a dungeon, Because lets face facts, standing round IF / SW / ORG Spamming trade "LF 1 Tank, 1 Healer 2 DPS for scholo, have key" for 2 hours+ was fun.

Flying Mounts ruined the WORLD aspect of the game. World of Warcraft was exciting because we got to see new areas in the world to explore.
Cataclysm revamped an entire world that we used to love, but they decided to hand out flying mounts at level 60 and increase the rate of quests, not only did this force us to skip over alot of great towns, forests, villages, caves, but it also pushed us out of the "NEW" questing zones alot faster because Exp was too low. Removing flying from kalimdor and eastern kindgoms until level 80, instead of 60.

The speed of people running through the content is due mainly to the use of BOA's and Guild XP bonus's. If you feel that your running through the zones too quickly, there is nothing stopping you from carrying on and ending the zones stories, then moving onto the next zone. Do it without BOA's and it will be a more smooth leveling process, from zone to zone. Rather than Zone skip a zone carry on. There is no reason to remove flying at 60. Some people may decied to carry on through the zones, or do some farming of herbs or ores. should they be denied the ability to fly because others think it is unacceptable ?

Heroic Mode made raiding so basic.
In ulduar, we had to do special things to unlock heroic mode, then ICC comes out and boom, Heroic Lich king in a flick of a menu switch.
Yes, they've added elite modes to fix this problem, but it doesn't really FIX the problem. This game is becoming nothing but menu's.

you have to do special things now to unlock heroic mode, that is make sure at least one person has completed the content on normal mode first. I do belive however that before someone can enter heroic mode that they should have cleared normal modes at least once before, rather than being able to leach of the leaders ability to unlock heroic mode for everyone.

LFR, This design was great, till it was implemented.
Grouped up with 24 random strangers, who won't give a flying hoot about you. Then you have atleast 4 people who queue, put someone on follow, then afks while they're eating chips or watching re runs of Big Bang Theory. Flex modes is supposed to fix this problem, but once again they're implementing it wrong. Remove LFR, and implement Flex mode into normal. That way we can recruit others from diff realms but still be engaged. Heroic Modes would still require a server coordinated group for that current content.

Im sorry that you dont find LFR enjoyable, but again that is YOU. No one is forcing you to do it, it is personal choice, it offers very little in the way of serious upgrades, most of which can be bettered from VP vendors anyway. LFR is a great tool for those that cannot commit to a raiding schedule, or for those that like to smack bosses around the head for the fun of it. Sure you get a few people in them that do not pay any attention, but lets face it. LFR is not exactly difficult. as long as the tanks, healers and a handful of DPS are awake and doing what needs to be done then it will be fine.

The World is Evolving while World of Warcraft is not.
We still pay $15 a month, and $40 for a new expansion that comes out. I feel it's about time blizzard lowers their price for a month, or remove it completely. Keep the prices for expansions, but remove the monthly fee. That way you can focus on a blizzard store that would engage players.
Like league of legends and their skins. (Helm transmogs was a slap to our face, especially when we pay for this game. I have a Celestial Steed, but epic transmog like that just hurts. HURTS!)

at the current moment in time the cash shop does not generate anywhere near enough money to make the game F2P. in fact without something drastically changing, such as better than currently avalible gear be sold on it or items that are required to play properly then it will never generate the income requirements for the infrastructure that is needed to host the servers, pay the staff, and develop content to the quality we are used to. There is also the problem that with F2P comes the toxic (even more than it is now) community with nothing to stop them getting banned and immediately opening a new account and continuing to abuse people as many times as they want.

Dailies in Mists of Pandaria are boring and dead.
Not much to comment on this anymore as 5.1 had a good model on dailies and 5.3 does too, although 5.3 quests were over too fast. Have it progress every week like 5.1 dailies did with rep, with a short storyline.

Dailies are Dailies doesn't matter which content patch they are for, they are always simple repetitive tasks with two objectives, A Gold / Currency income, and Rep Grinding. There is absolutely no difference in 5.3 dailies on the Isle of thunder, to the Dailies of The Burning Crusade. You are not forced to do them to access any content, and there is no long rep required to access heroic dungeons. If you don't like them then the simple answer is don't do them.

The world of PvP, slapped in the face.
Making gold as a pvper isn't a reality unless you're an enchanter. Make the gold that drops from players you kill higher. All it drops is copper, my repair bill from dying from pets is higher than that. Allow us to once again go out in the world to queue for a battleground and arenas.

Spend your spare Honour on trade goods and sell them
Learn how to play the AH between arena match ups, RBG, BG's etc
Darkmoon Fair PVP books will sell to those that dont PVP, Put them on the AH.
Learn a profession. Its BS that "only enchanting will make you gold" all of them make gold you just need to learn how to use them.

[Deleted]

lol, I can't prove it, but if you played back then, you'd realize the social atmosphere was WAY better. You'd make buddies while questing, join guilds to do dungeons and raid, the game was all about getting together to take on challenges. Now you can get to 90 and down all the bosses in raids without having to talk to anyone once ever, not only that, it requires little effort to do it. So in that way, yes, the community was much much better.

Yes I played back then and yes the social atmosphere was better, but was that because of a lack of a dungeon finder tool or some other reason? Because I can tell you that for me the social aspect didn't automatically go downhill the minute 3.3 went live. Maybe the community was so fantastic back in the first years was this was the period , naturally, with the largest influx of new players who were keen and passionate about the game and eager to involve in any way they can. You can't disprove my theory any more than you can prove yours but what do get to do is choose what theory best fits our own personal agenda; namely for me that the corrosion of the community can't be traced to one definitive reason and for you that it can be.
Note, that I'm not saying some design choices haven't led to a corrosion of the former community bonds or at least facilitated that ; only that I believe the reasons for "where WoW went wrong" are a lot more complex than "the introduction of X, Y and Z features which I don't like".

[Tomana]

It's not about individual negative experiences (we all had them, more or less), it's about how much LFD takes away from the potential social opportunities that never occur because of it.

In this case, the chore massively outweighs the benefits of the said social opportunities. Indeed, no one is removing the said opportunities from the game. For example, late LK still saw PuGs despite LFD being there.

f grouping would really be such a chore people would be leaving in droves as soon as the novelty of vanilla wore off, but they didn't, even though there was hardly any other content in the game.

They did quit, it just that while the MMO market was not saturated, the influx of new players was enough to overcome the quitting players.

[vesseblah]

lol, I can't prove it, but if you played back then, you'd realize the social atmosphere was WAY better.

My ignore list was longest in vanilla by wide margin. Had to clear few random names there every week to add more. 50 cap was way too low.

You'd make buddies while questing,

Not even one.

join guilds to do dungeons and raid,

Can still do that, and it's required for hardest raids. Nothing changed.

Now you can get to 90 and down all the bosses in raids without having to talk to anyone once ever

So adding options instead of forcing everybody into same mold is bad?

[RickJamesLich]

Erhm, I'm not sure why you disagree here...

Naturally it's not the same things they whine about today, the game has changed, so it's other things now. But I didn't specify that they complain about the same things, just that they complained just as much in the beginning, as they do now

Haha, I will agree that they did complain back then too, I think the complaining is for a lack of words... much more silly now. You see stuff like "what the hell? I couldn't one shot lei shen in LFR this week.... NERF!!!" whereas before it was more about certain classes being OP or not OP and blah blah blah. At least back then they'd to make some sort of argument... the key word is try. Just seems like the community has gotten a lot less intelligent.

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My ignore list was longest in vanilla by wide margin. Had to clear few random names there every week to add more. 50 cap was way too low.



Not even one.



Can still do that, and it's required for hardest raids. Nothing changed.



So adding options instead of forcing everybody into same mold is bad?

Wow, I feel bad for you if you didn't make any buddies while leveling to 60 or 70... almost everyone I know had an easy time doing it as there were people everyone and chances were, someone was on the same quest chain that you were. And at this point, the main reason for most people to join guilds is xp perks... how many guilds are doing hard modes? Beyond that, there's really no reason to join any more because all you gotta do is click a shiny button instead of chatting it up with people. And yes, I do realize some people think the massive decrease in the social side of the game is a good thing, but for a lot of long time WoW players, the social atmosphere was the best part about it.

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Yes I played back then and yes the social atmosphere was better, but was that because of a lack of a dungeon finder tool or some other reason? Because I can tell you that for me the social aspect didn't automatically go downhill the minute 3.3 went live. Maybe the community was so fantastic back in the first years was this was the period , naturally, with the largest influx of new players who were keen and passionate about the game and eager to involve in any way they can. You can't disprove my theory any more than you can prove yours but what do get to do is choose what theory best fits our own personal agenda; namely for me that the corrosion of the community can't be traced to one definitive reason and for you that it can be.
Note, that I'm not saying some design choices haven't led to a corrosion of the former community bonds or at least facilitated that ; only that I believe the reasons for "where WoW went wrong" are a lot more complex than "the introduction of X, Y and Z features which I don't like".

Yes, I agree I can't prove it, except the you agreed the social atmosphere was much better. LFD was one of the main reasons why that's gone, and no it didn't disappear a few minutes after it was implemented, but not long after. It's one of those things where you if you see someone stumbling around and smell booze on their breath, you can't *prove* they are drunk, but you can probably safely assume lol.

[Last Starfighter]

I don't even know why people bitch about dailies anymore.

I disagree, but at least understand, why people felt pressured to do them early in the expansion so they could get into 489s faster for raiding, especially if those people had guilds that made it mandatory.

Now that you can easily jump right into 502s without doing a single rep grind, I don't even understand why people are bitter about them. There is pretty much no reason to do them now except for your personal design to get vanity rewards like mounts or tabards or fulfill your reputation OCD.

I hate dailies so I never do them. If you're the same way, don't torture yourself.

I'll help you understand. The problem was never about dailies. It's about control over the direction of the game. People vent frustrations they have irl online. People look at dailies as catering to elitists. Which it isn't. But that's what people feel. People built this imaginary enemy in their minds of the big bad elitist grinding dailies away getting VP and coins and totally one upping everyone else, and they can't have that. That's what it's about. Blizzard could take away gold and valor points from you for doing dailies, and people would still bitch that "there is no choice, you have to do them". Because that's how petty people are online. And that pettiness and passive/aggressive, emotional garbage is what will ultimately do the game in. Because people don't care what is best for the direction of the game. They just care about altering the direction of it.

Dailies were never mandatory. If you were in the top 5%? Sure. I could see that. But for the rest of the 95% absolutely not.

[Lime]

lol, I can't prove it, but if you played back then, you'd realize the social atmosphere was WAY better.

I played back then and the atmosphere is still pretty much the same. I never have problems joining an LFD or LFR and starting some friendly conversations. Its funny because usually when I run into someone from the board who says that in an LFD / LFR, they're usually the anti-social ones.

You'd make buddies while questing,

You can still make buddies while questing... I usually end up making more friends with each alt I level.

join guilds to do dungeons and raid, the game was all about getting together to take on challenges. Now you can get to 90 and down all the bosses in raids without having to talk to anyone once ever, not only that, it requires little effort to do it. So in that way, yes, the community was much much better.

You never had to join a guild to do dungeons or raids. Lots of players pugged Vanilla dungeons and MC. Did you pretty much have to be in a guild to do the hardest content? Yeah, but thats still in the game...

The community wasn't as amazing as you make it out to be. Is it worse now? Maybe, but thats because people can't wipe the nostalgia dust out of their eyes.

[Youarefired]

Nobody said you had to fly in Azeroth.

[Xsy]

I'm pretty sure we had around one billion threads like this just in the past week, I mean, why do you people keep reiterating the same point? I get it, some of you liked how it was in vanilla, which was awful in my opinion, but don't you get it that it will never return to how it used to be? Blizzard will never remove flying mounts or LFD and now LFR. If you don't like it, don't do it. If you just don't like the game, stop playing it. There is absolutely no use of spamming the same 'complaints' over and over again.

[Paulosio]

I don't even know why people bitch about dailies anymore.

I disagree, but at least understand, why people felt pressured to do them early in the expansion so they could get into 489s faster for raiding, especially if those people had guilds that made it mandatory.

Now that you can easily jump right into 502s without doing a single rep grind, I don't even understand why people are bitter about them. There is pretty much no reason to do them now except for your personal design to get vanity rewards like mounts or tabards or fulfill your reputation OCD.

I hate dailies so I never do them. If you're the same way, don't torture yourself.

I've got about seven level 85 or lower alts fully exalted with golden lotus, august celestials, klaxxi and shado pan just from using the rep tokens from warbringers while I farmed the 3 mounts.. I've got around 200k rep worth of each token in the bank too because I have no more characters to use them on... Even if you want to get the rep you don't need to do the dailies.

[vesseblah]

Wow, I feel bad for you if you didn't make any buddies while leveling to 60 or 70...

Low population realm means place's almost empty + being in realm's #1 raid guild. If you need help for some group quest there's /guild to poke. Kinda pointing at your comment about guilds there... they're not only for raiding.

[Weightlifter]

Lol at all those "b-b-but you don't have to, you can still do it the old-fashioned way" people. Good luck trying to find a dungeon group manually when it takes like 10 minutes to finish a dungeon, including the time spent in queue.

[Deleted]

This has all been said before. What point are you trying to make exactly? You don't like the game anymore? Good for you, don't play it.

[TS26]

Wow isn't ruined, you just got bored of it.

[Milerks]

Wow isn't ruined, you just got bored of it.

bored of the way it currently is, and it started since cata

[Deleted]

Why can't people stop making posts like these. No it isn't going to change back. I enjoyed every expansion
in its own way. There is absolutely no need to create threads full of complaining and comparing. I have nothing
against nostalgic threads but cmon this is getting a bit annoying..

[Osmeric]

Why can't people stop making posts like these.

Discussion happened on a forum. Call the internet police!