WoW is pulling a HotS

[FelPlague]

WOTLK was stupidly hardcore compared to current game. get out.

Lol, nah, nah it wasnt, if you wanna know how it really was check out bells recent vid, its actually super good.
even mentions how ICC had an almost 3 month timegate, and people cry about todays timegates?

[Soon-TM]

HotS was always considered a joke in the MOBA scene. Who the fuck designs a MOBA with communist shared reward structures?

Then you have the clowny degenerate skins and retarded map design.

It's a casual players dream. I honestly feel sorry for the "pro players" that just got fucked in the ass by Blizzard.

Ironically Overwatch and WoW are also considered a joke in the e-sports scene. Overwatch attempts to appeal to non-gamers and is an absolute clusterfuck to follow. WoW is the same although their GCD nerfing attempts were to address that.

I still can't fathom why is Blizzard so hell-bent at turning their games into e-sports, when they've clearly failed at every single attempt. Except with OW, maaaaaybe... Oh and SC1, if stuff from 20 years ago still counts.

[Phuongvi]

You do realise you could farm heroic dungeons while blindfolded and get tier sets, right?

you do relaise now you have have a lot Piñatas at every foot square ?
You take a flight path then kill an elite and you coul litteraly kill it by pressing one button and get a valuable piece of gear of an heroic equivalent ?
And that doesn't count the new *hardcore* zone Arathi and Darkshore
WOTLK was tupidly hardcore compared to current game. : Yes

[Schizoide]

HoTS was innovative. Blizzard tried to actually do something different in the MOBA genre. It didn't work, but we should all applaud their ambition.

Would a polished copy of LoL or DoTA pulled those players away? Who knows, but my feeling is no. It's incredibly difficult to kill the king and take his crown. It's only happened a couple times in the history of gaming-- WoW/Everquest and Fortnite/PUBG come to mind, and in both of those cases the king had a fatal flaw. Everquest was extremely hardcore and PUBG has major technical issues and costs money.

Making games accessible is a good thing. Nobody wants to play Everquest. I remember back in the day I would sit at the zone line for Lower Guk and advertise in /ooc for a Frenzied ghoul group for hours, until I eventually just quit for the day having done literally nothing. I remember finding a group of 3 soloable mobs in a hidden location, staggering their spawntimes to 2 minutes apart, and camping there for 11 hours straight, paranoid that someone else would find my spot and take it from me. That's hardcore.

WoW numbers are dropping because it's a fifteen year old game. It's natural. Not to imply the devs don't make boneheaded decisions, they absolutely do, and changing stuff would slow the bleeding. But there's no way to stop the bleeding.

[Lillemus]

It's always fun to return to MMO-champions forums when I pick up the game again, it's amazing to see the amount of people still on here complaining that the video game they liked 10 years ago is no longer the video game they liked. It's almost scary, it's like some of you poor souls are stuck in an abusive relationship (although at this point I'm a bit uncertain as to who is the abuser), I'm afraid that Activision-Blizzard is about to start the cycle anew with WoW Classic, hopefully you will be happy now that your partner is gonna go back to when things were good.
As a note on all the people pointing out the growth from 2004-2008 and stating that going back to the design back then will revitalize WoW and generate (infinite?) growth, have you ever considered contacting Blockbuster and telling them that they should go back to renting out VHS tapes, or heck, you might even be able to actually to straight up buy Blockbuster and generate infinite growth with that there VHS scheme. So there, consider that my stock tip to you guys, enjoy your infinity dollars, you've earned it.

[Thelxi]

I don't think that Blizzard's innovations and streamlining of conventional moba gameplay was HotS' downfall. I think that the game first and foremost looked and felt like shit, so any innovation or streamlining they did never stood a fair chance. It's just a shit game and a blight in Blizzard's track record.

I also don't really agree that WoW streamlines. I mean they do, but really the goal is always to get more people on reward treadmills. LFR, flex/normal raiding, all of it was done not to streamline the game, but to get a much larger chunk of the playerbase on those sweet weekly lockout treadmills. So yeah they end up opening different content for more casual players, but really the problem is greed, and make no mistake about it.

[Soon-TM]

I don't think that Blizzard's innovations and streamlining of conventional moba gameplay was HotS' downfall. I think that the game first and foremost looked and felt like shit, so any innovation or streamlining they did never stood a fair chance. It's just a shit game and a blight in Blizzard's track record.

The main problem with HotS is that good ol' lumbering Blizz was too late to the party. The game itself is fine imo, it tries (tried?) to take a unique spin on certain conventions established by the Big Two, but it simply came too late. The irony is that Blizzard could have been LORDS of the moba genre had they only listened to Icefrog back then.

It's always fun to return to MMO-champions forums when I pick up the game again, it's amazing to see the amount of people still on here complaining that the video game they liked 10 years ago is no longer the video game they liked. It's almost scary, it's like some of you poor souls are stuck in an abusive relationship (although at this point I'm a bit uncertain as to who is the abuser), I'm afraid that Activision-Blizzard is about to start the cycle anew with WoW Classic, hopefully you will be happy now that your partner is gonna go back to when things were good.
As a note on all the people pointing out the growth from 2004-2008 and stating that going back to the design back then will revitalize WoW and generate (infinite?) growth, have you ever considered contacting Blockbuster and telling them that they should go back to renting out VHS tapes, or heck, you might even be able to actually to straight up buy Blockbuster and generate infinite growth with that there VHS scheme. So there, consider that my stock tip to you guys, enjoy your infinity dollars, you've earned it.

Congratulations sir/ma'am, you've earned the prize to the Strawman of the Month. You should actually be reported by trolling, but mods here are lenient, TOO lenient when it comes to pro-Blizzard trolling.

[Lillemus]

Congratulations sir/ma'am, you've earned the prize to the Strawman of the Month. You should actually be reported by trolling, but mods here are lenient, TOO lenient when it comes to pro-Blizzard trolling.

How on earth was that a Strawman? There have been several posts in this thread showing that darn graph displaying the game growing throughout Vanilla and TBC and somehow always attributing it to design rather than the climate around WoW causing it thrive, sure the Blockbuster analogy is hyperbolic but that was just an attempt to get the point across.
I am not sure how the comment is pro Activision-Blizzard either, if anything likening them to Blockbuster is not exactly a flattering comparison. I understand that some people may feel betrayed by the creative direction Blizzard has taken during the past decade or so, but if the last product you liked from them is over a decade old, it might just be time to move on to greener pastures.

[Marmot]

WOTLK was stupidly hardcore compared to current game. get out.

I think the better argument to make is that WOTLK was more of an RPG than the current game, and that the systems involved were perhaps more satisfying than the current loot simulator that rides on people being addicted to increasing their item level.

[Sansnom]

WOTLK was stupidly hardcore compared to current game. get out.

Not really in my opinion. Dungeons were easier until the Heroic LK dungeons.

If you are referring to getting gear outside raiding, then sure because there were less option but does it make it more hardcore? People just farmed dungeons for VP to buy some gear back then.

[kail]

TL;DR: Heroes of the Storms is a MOBA made for people that does not like MOBAs. BfA is a MMORPG made for people that does not like MMORPGs.

It's thoughts like the OPs that prevent developers from doing anything different and staying safe within what already exists. HOTS is a MOBA game for those who don't like LoL, Dota2, etc. while BFA is for those...who like BFA. WoW is still very much the lead MMO whether you like it or not.

[Syegfryed]

The main problem with HotS is that good ol' lumbering Blizz was too late to the party. The game itself is fine imo, it tries (tried?) to take a unique spin on certain conventions established by the Big Two, but it simply came too late. The irony is that Blizzard could have been LORDS of the moba genre had they only listened to Icefrog back then.
.

thank god they didn't, blizzard would probably kick icefrog and destroy dota, like people said hots its moba for people who don't like mobas, and this niche isn't that big.

[RuneDK]

WOTLK was stupidly hardcore compared to current game. get out.

how? How can you honestly say it was stupidly hardcore in comparison to now? It was the expansion that introduced welfare epics to begin with. It was in no way shape or form more "hardcore" than current wow.

- - - Updated - - -

Not really in my opinion. Dungeons were easier until the Heroic LK dungeons.

If you are referring to getting gear outside raiding, then sure because there were less option but does it make it more hardcore? People just farmed dungeons for VP to buy some gear back then.

even the heroic LK dungeons weren't that hard, they were harder than the original dungeons sure...but they really weren't difficult at all.

[shadowmatrix]

Imagine understanding that it's not a CO-OP elements what makes MMO into a fucking MMO, COMMUNITY does it - the thing which doesn't exist in current WoW.

Your "community" is the people you interact with, those millions of people you never meet don't mean anything.

[vsb]

It's always fun to return to MMO-champions forums when I pick up the game again, it's amazing to see the amount of people still on here complaining that the video game they liked 10 years ago is no longer the video game they liked. It's almost scary, it's like some of you poor souls are stuck in an abusive relationship (although at this point I'm a bit uncertain as to who is the abuser), I'm afraid that Activision-Blizzard is about to start the cycle anew with WoW Classic, hopefully you will be happy now that your partner is gonna go back to when things were good.

That has some truth in it. WoW is not a videogame for me, it's style of life. I don't play any games for a long time, I don't have time for that. But WoW is different, I played it 10 hours/day 10 years ago and I'm playing it 10 hours/day now. Progress on a single boss spending days after days with 20 like-minded individuals, that's the playstyle that WoW delivers and noone else can. And yeah, WoW is getting worse, it's still awesome but Classic gonna be huge, because there will be engaging content in the game apart of raids.

[Toppy]

Except, you're wrong.

No Wrath was incredibly casual. It had very high rates of people raiding mostly because, aside from Ulduar, the raids were piss easy: Naxx was a joke, Trial was a joke, and half the difficulties of ICC were puggable. It also introduced both the dungeon matchmaking and the valor system so gear was readily available for doing very little as the dungeons, even heroic, were also piss easy face roll fests.

Not saying these things are inherently good or bad, but, Wrath certainly was incredibly casual compared to anything before it and set many of the standards to come that we still hold on to.

[Narwal]

This ENTIRE thing falls apart when you realize the most casual friendly expansion Wrath that people glorify these days was HYPER casual friendly and had over 11 million subs.

Assume you are correct that Wrath was the initial casualization of the game, the data actually shows the opposite of what you claim. The claim you make that Wrath was highly successful, even catered to casuals.


https://goo.gl/images/zxJA2h

What is shown here, is that Wrath is the period of wow where it stopped growing. Was it the peak of the game that had the most users? Yes. Did Wrath earn that peak, or did it inherit the peak because of the success of Vanilla and BC? It's also important to remember that Wrath had the thematic peak of the entire WoW series to help bolster its numbers. Based on the successive growth of the game that Wrath was handed, and the thematic peak it was given, I would say that Wrath actually objectively failed, when it comes to the health of the WoW Franchise. It did not hand Cataclysm a growing player-base, but an objectively stagnant one that saw little growth over the entire expansion. It also used the most compelling lore of the warcraft story, which would make any theme following it seem less compelling. Even if there are more compelling stories to tell, Cataclysm was not given one, and this is coming from someone who actually liked the fact we were slaying dragons again.

[Demithio]

Although the latter half of wotlk was when things started becoming more casual; you cannot compare wotlk with the current shit show. They are almost two separate games, with different "feel" and design scope. Wotlk was able to retain most of WoW's original charm, the current state of the game has zero of it.

[Sansnom]

Don't try to speak logic to the people who defend Blizzard on these boards.

As oppose to what? The people who attacks Blizzard speaks the truth?

BfA is an MMORPG for people who don't like MMORPGs. Since it no longer contains any RPG and it no longer contains any MMO.

What MMO or RPG element did it have in the past that it does not have now?

It is always curious why people who no longer likes the game or Blizzard continues to post on this forum.

[Accendor]

It is always curious why people who no longer likes the game or Blizzard continues to post on this forum.

Because we like the game and want it to do better so we can return.