What is WoW's Greatest Bottleneck?

[Yamuri]

The old ass engine.

[crakerjack]

The community. Back in the early days, pretty much everyone was doing raids/dungeons or PvP. The average player was more competent and there were less features to draw players away from PvE and PvP content. Now you have pet battles, transmog farming and countless other things people can do. More things isn't necessarily bad, but we're at the point where the community is spread too thin.

[Kikazz]

Wheres the "Recruitment" Option.

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1. Payment model and distribution. B2P/F2P on consoles (Xb/PlSt/Nin) and Steam with native controller support can reach more people under different play & pay preferences.

Blizz said they would never do this for Wow specifically, due to the Cache of Characters Console side, being able to mod them and re-enter there services with changed/moded stats and gear.

aka lvl 1000 character with 50b hp 1 shotting Mythic Bosses, or clearing Mythic+ 79 dungeons solo for example.

on PS4 i ran into a random group that had just started the Season and they were lvl 70 with 2500 paragon lvl, 30 minutes after season hit....

[mauserr]

The engine and Blizzard. They give PvP little to no content but try to push it like an Esport, which is bad for PvPers. And looking at Twitch, right now PvP games are the thing. So that is one thing. Two, the engine is old, nobody wants to play an old game. Three, they never add customization. There is a huge audience that plays Korean MMOs just for the customization. Right now the game is just a rinse and repeat of a raid.

The engine? I hope you mean technologically (poor hardware utilisation on the CPU side, etc), not combat wise. WoW in combat is the smoothest I have ever seen in an MMORPG. It isn't laggy or sluggish like all the other mmos I've played. Personally Blizzard's combat engine is perfect.

2. Combat. We're still tab-targeting in 2018. MMOs now use action combat. Get with the times.

Probably why they're nowhere near close to the success WoW has. That action combat is so dogshit, feels so awful.

[Deleted]

WoW would go back to it's glory days if the combat mechanisms, PC customization, professions and game engine (how it handles modern hardware overall) would be 2018. ready. Sadly now it's 2004. ready. And sadly most of the game stuck in the 2000's, while software/hardware standards are way higher nowadays.

You can say that many ppl still play on a toaster, but that's not an excuse. If the software is well optimized, then it has many graphic options which actually change the look and have impact on resource consumpion when set to higher or lower. It won't look good, but at least you could play with +30 fps.

Not to mention that even server hardwares need serious upgrade, because on high pop realms there is serious lag in peak times when you interact with npc-s, but AH is the worst when you wait 10-15 seconds for 1 single item. Servers simply can't handle the amount of requests, especially with addons nowadays.

Simply put: WoW is kept alive by it's few revolutionary ideas expansion to expansion, but most importantly, by it's fame and it's loyal players (I'm one of them). While keeping up the good ideas, it should have serious hardware and software support that meets nowadays standards.

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Personally Blizzard's combat engine is perfect.

It may feel good, but it has fundamental flaws. E.g. the function of armour and the lack of customization for different type of resistances. Melee combat doesn't know multiple types of damage, like thrust or slash damage, and the random passive parry/dodge mechanism is also archaic and needs to go in it's current form. Pushback from taking damage while casting? Don't make me laugh.

Pour some Dark Souls combat mechanism to WoW and it would be perfect.

[Kellorion]

Disregarding the current game to hurry and get to the next one.

[Deleted]

Its developers themselves and their linear way of thinking. When WoW was at its prime time, it used to have depth, used to have variety. Now developers have streamlined everything, making it dull in process. Professions are copies of each other, classes feel similar and can be put into few categories: strict rotations, whack-a-proc, watch-many-dots and combinations of them, reputations are identical with only 1 way of gaining rep.

Remember reputations in BC? For Cenarion you could quest, you could do dungeons, you could hand in stuff (that you could trade with other players) for rep. For Skyguard you could do dailies or you could grind mobs. You had choice.

Today game offers no choice at all. Everything is the same, streamlined and cloned.

Disregarding the current game to hurry and get to the next one.

This too. Making all old content obsolete hurts game a lot. There is massive world out there, but developers make all old content irrelevant. Professions no longer require leveling up skills, just pick it up and do everything at skill 1, so all old content is useless. Raids become obsolete the moment next one comes out. There is no longer progression, progression is now limited to multiple modes of same raid rather than multiple raids.

So overall its developers fault.

[Flurryfang]

I think it is quite clear, that WoWs biggest problem in Legion was Blizzs philosophy about having a ton of RNG in the game, which lead to legendaries, TF and the breaking of the item lvl structure.

But in general overall, i think that the lack of an interesting story and interesting characters is actually what is holding it back from being truly great. I think that what kept alot of people hooked back in the days, was the worldbuilding and the story of WoW, the characters who interacted with you and the promise of mighty foes. That is what has been lacking quite highly lately and while the game does not suffer under it, it is really the thing that holds it back from thriving i think.


"Try to satisfy everybody and you will satisfy nobody.". I think this is a philosophy, that Blizzard have tried to follow for too long and they should really just focus on a few core things and do them really great.

[mauserr]

It may feel good, but it has fundamental flaws. E.g. the function of armour and the lack of customization for different type of resistances. Melee combat doesn't know multiple types of damage, like thrust or slash damage, and the random passive parry/dodge mechanism is also archaic and needs to go in it's current form. Pushback from taking damage while casting? Don't make me laugh.

Pour some Dark Souls combat mechanism to WoW and it would be perfect.

Let's be real here. What good would that do? Those mechanics have no place in an MMORPG. This isn't a single player game like Dark Souls.

[Kellorion]

Its developers themselves and their linear way of thinking. When WoW was at its prime time, it used to have depth, used to have variety. Now developers have streamlined everything, making it dull in process. Professions are copies of each other, classes feel similar and can be put into few categories: strict rotations, whack-a-proc, watch-many-dots and combinations of them, reputations are identical with only 1 way of gaining rep.

Remember reputations in BC? For Cenarion you could quest, you could do dungeons, you could hand in stuff (that you could trade with other players) for rep. For Skyguard you could do dailies or you could grind mobs. You had choice.

Today game offers no choice at all. Everything is the same, streamlined and cloned.


This too. Making all old content obsolete hurts game a lot. There is massive world out there, but developers make all old content irrelevant. Professions no longer require leveling up skills, just pick it up and do everything at skill 1, so all old content is useless. Raids become obsolete the moment next one comes out. There is no longer progression, progression is now limited to multiple modes of same raid rather than multiple raids.

So overall its developers fault.

meant more along the lines of drought because the next one got get made, they get to excited and forgot about their the old toy, they got last week. like 7.3 , the culmination of damn near everything a 25,000 year fight fight in the making, and no one (lore characters) showed up.

[kamuimac]

This is a topic we all think about in various forms. What do you think is the thing holding WoW back the most?



EDIT: TOTALLY FORGOT TO PUT "COMBAT" ON THERE, WHICH IS MY MAIN COMPLAINT, UGH.

the enourmous jump from easy endgame (in case of legion argus dailies and lfr) to hard endgame (mythic + dungeons and normal+ raids)

for most of people its imposible to get through easy way so they just cba .

in past blizzard was able to smooth it out with badge/vp gear but for some reason they decided to divide playerbase into 2 groups lfr and below / normal and higher.

what was their reason who knows but we can see by activity numbers that it backfired horribly and blizzard lost 60-80% of their wow customers in 6 years.

[Silox]

I agree with the jump between LFR and normal. People who want to gear can generally get to around 930.
To gear up they have to be ilvl 945, link curve achiev etc etc. But thats also maybe the behaviour of the community.

Which would be bottleneck 2. Premade raid groups are toxic as hell. Do to normal, people basically request that you've already done Mythic.
This creates a void for people wanting to gear, but dont have a raid guild or cant get in one for reasons above.

Perhaps leveling the 4 types a bit more. Move normal more towards LFR.

[Battlebeard]

Nothing of the above, but I guess Blizzard's General Philosophy is closests.

I hate the "play 24/7 or fall behind" idea of todays game. Never ending grinds of WQs, AP, Legendaries etc is needed to keep up. I want to be able to be a raid-logger if I want to, and don't wanna be forced to do all these crazy grinds.

And don't get me started on all the insane achivs to give a sense of more content. Level 25 prestige of 10k World quests. They can't even be serious with this... INSANE!

[Deleted]

I've always wondered. Does anyone still remain from the original team which created vanilla? Everything took an abrupt turn after WoTLK, not for the worst, but still a climactic change in the game's hemisphere nonetheless.

[Deleted]

combat system

[Deleted]

Let's be real here. What good would that do? Those mechanics have no place in an MMORPG. This isn't a single player game like Dark Souls.

Ok, then why a cloth wearer can have +20% armour, then a plate wearer +40-45%. It's silly.

Also armour protects only against physical attacks, while spells completely ignore it.

Still feels perfect?

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Level 25 prestige of 10k World quests. They can't even be serious with this... INSANE!

No one forces you to do them.

[Deleted]

The community, and this is why: the community decides what content you will have access too beyond group finder content.

[sam86]

the story, as long wow stays mmo format, the story will stay the same, always, u'll never log one day to find blood elves got stockholm syndrome and back to alliance, or the horde dismantled, it will always stay the same, and as of patch 7.3 we reached the ridiculous comical lvl of beating a fucking titan, a sick weakened titan soul but still titan, leaving only the very fresh half baked 'enemy' void lords as the only next higher step
imagine going to dungeon to fight a troll boss, and u should - as a rpg game - feel 'threat' from him, u who fucked a titan, need to 'worry' from a random npc troll (or orc or whatever), yeah...

[Deleted]

The community, and this is why: the community decides what content you will have access too beyond group finder content.

This is very true. However you have to decide if it's good or bad. Good, if you want to go with ppl on your skill level, bad, if the groups ask for absurd requirements for trivial content.

And the "bad" part is intended. It forces players to stay with the curve, play the game, achieve higher and higher ilvl to meet the requirements that rise over time (it's the TF system/weekly M+ chest). Sneaky business strategy for the masses, but you can outplay it with a viable guild.

[Kraddark]

The community has no idea what they want. Blizzard has no idea how write for a roleplaying game.