One of the big problem with WoW nowadays is the lack of sense of progress

[rrayy]

Vannila didnt had mythic raiding so it wasnt always like that. People dont care about mythic

ANd here is where you lose all credibility. you only speak for you. Your opinion is nowhere near shared by everyone. IN fact, people do care to push it, unless you are trying to claim Method and Limit do not exist because that is the only way your ridiculous argument even has a chance to stick.

[Osmeric]

comparing invalidation by expansion to invalidation in months
there is no lengths of strawman you go for to make your flacid points

I suppose they are different if you have a short attention span.

[Osmeric]

nope, completly obvious if someone isnt just dumb and making strawmans again

No, I'm pointing out that that invalidated progression. It didn't do it as often, but it did it. You are trying to make a difference of degree into a difference of kind.

Anyway, the whole discussion is idiotic, since making progression "matter" in the sense wanted would destroy the game very quickly.

[Elias01]

ANd here is where you lose all credibility. you only speak for you. Your opinion is nowhere near shared by everyone. IN fact, people do care to push it, unless you are trying to claim Method and Limit do not exist because that is the only way your ridiculous argument even has a chance to stick.

Method and Limit wont pay developing of wow. I am talking about majority. Becouse this core auduence is who is quiting game and dislike game direction.

[rrayy]

Method and Limit wont pay developing of wow. I am talking about majority. Becouse this core auduence is who is quiting game and dislike game direction.

Now you are moving the goalposts and you are still wrong. A ton of people care about Mythic raiding. Again, stop projecting your opinion on to all other players

[therealstegblob]

No, I don't want to do LFR, I want to do content that is well built up instead of doing the same thing 4 times and then you can't even be proud of your mythic gear because the value of it so bad.

spoilerz: You don't have to do LFR or Normal.

[Osmeric]

Hyperbole and baseless claim

Nope, it's entirely obvious to anyone with even a shred of clue. Such a design would cause most players to not progress (since if everyone, including all those LFR players, could progress, you wouldn't call it progression.) And those players would walk away. And the game would bleed out and die in short order.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Of course, the progress is this 3 digit number that changes as you get gear ever so slightly. At first, of course, it goes up fast and it feels good and then it slows down and forces you to do the grind. A grind which pretty much boils down to do 3 things over.. and over.. and over... and over again with the activity also having a little number or level that goes up ever so much.

[Elias01]

Now you are moving the goalposts and you are still wrong. A ton of people care about Mythic raiding. Again, stop projecting your opinion on to all other players

Thia isnt opinion. If casual audience would care about mythic raiding or any type of higher difficulty content they would not quit in current big numbers. It is hard to care about something with current inclusive content.

[stigz]

WoW, with BFA spearheading this development, is astoundingly bad at understanding players. It's been molded by shortsighted bandwagon riots on forums and buzzwords.
"Non-raid content should be optional"
"Mandatory grinds are bad"
"If I just want to log in and raid I should be allowed to do so."

And of course many others. At the same time I suppose Blizzard couldn't avoid noticing that games that does everything they can do just appeal to as many people for as long as it takes to make them spend money, is a very lucrative business. And there are probably heaps of charts showing long-term players eventually leaving.

But it's backwards, just as any other bad company decision that is misinterpreting valid data. You don't lose players who has played the game for 10+ years all of a sudden. You can blame the same factors players has been pointing at for the last 8+ years. Getting bored, life changing, less time to play, yada yada.

Well I can say one thing for certain, while I sure have less time (and energy) to play games like I did in my teens, or during (a quite unfortunately easy/laid back) college education, that is NOT the reason I do not enjoy WoW anymore. Whenever I played I still felt that captivating Warcraft experience hiding in the background. But it is being poisoned by overarching game design decisions and Blizzards complete inability to realize that you can't focus on every god damn type of player at once.

You should NEVER design an MMORPG around someone who plays maybe 30min/weekday and maybe 2-3h on weekends. And yet here we are, in a game that throws gear at you like it wants to be Diablo 3, and the only driving factor is ilvl. But unless you progression raid, you come to realize that... all content is easy as hell, at the first day at level 120. There is no natural progression outside of raids or M+. Everything is designed to overwhelm you with New Stuff™, and yet all of is feels soulless. Whenever they release a new island, new dungeons, or whatever, I just go in knowing I will be obliterating everything in my path regardless of how little I played the previous patch.

Catch-up mechanics are fine, this shit is not.

So, what Blizzard are doing:

All non-raid content that rewards gear should be fast and easy.
Barring M+ keys, dungeons should be 20 min AoE fests you can't lose.
Warfronts are designed so that you always win.
Island Expeditions are nothing but rushy AoE fests.
All world content is supposed to be easily soloed.
World bosses are loot pinatas, they shouldn't be able to wipe a raidgroup.
New update = catapult players overall gear to instantly be able to see the new raid = make old raid obsolete.
ALL challenge for players is put in premade content like M+ and organized raids. Everything else is a Theme Park with no barrier of entry.

So no, as you say OP, there is no progression.
There is no progression in obliterating everything for 120 levels, barely getting to customize anything.
And get to maxlevel, spend 2-3 afternoons getting showered in gear, from content that was braindead easy the moment you hit 120.
Then your only way to "progress" is to increase your ilvl, but your ONLY reason and drive to increase gear, is to do higher dps or whatever, in content you've already done.

BFA fails at understanding player psychology so hard it's not even funny.
Blizzard has completely forgotten what appeals to MMORPG players, and what kept those players motivated when farming repetitive stuff. It was because they yearned for the content on the horizon, they wanted their characters to become stronger so they could see the latest raid, or hell even new dungeons that were released. Or to become strong enough to do the new zone content. So they put in time and effort to get their characters ready and that created a rewarding feeling when your character was ready and could conquer that new content.

Now, you are ALWAYS ready for the frontlines, even if you haven't even played for half a year. Utter garbage.

Correct 100%. The easiness of the content and the fact that it scales just makes it feel so POINTLESS, like it has no soul, like I was meant to grind it for months. They REALLY need to step away from the Diablo model of things and go back to their roots.

The fact that everything had its own built in difficulty and didn't artificially scale to your current gear in the past made people spend "subscription time":
A) Learning more about the game in order to-->
B) Passionately pursue upgrading gear through challenging dungeons/raids/quests so that-->
C) You feel legitimately stronger in the World of Warcraft around them, that their time actually meant something, for people to look up to them, to crush their enemies.

I mean people have left the game in droves already from them pursuing catering to their current "target audience". Why don't they just try literally making the game how it used to be progression-wise when it was more popular? At this point.. what do they have to lose?

And I agree that the different difficulties totally destroys the feelings of immersion. It feels more like the Wheel of Warcraft than a World that I need to learn things in to conquer it. The new things we are having to learn is how to efficiently cheese a timer in an artificially timed dungeon.... that isn't what MMORPG's were ever about. That's what action arcadey hack and slash games were about. AoE fests... facerolling through all the content.. it's just like playing that one game where you run around as a Chinese warrior or whatever and kill 20 enemies at a time with one blow... over and over again.

[Dejablue]

This kinda sums it all up:

[Niwes]

And you think people wont get atract to wow becouse they cant catch up to people what have been playing for months? People dont care a bit if they can catch up. They will simply progress together with other new players in older content nothing els. This fear of players quiting game becouse they cant get into new raids is only in Blizzard head.

i dont think so. we had that in the past. since i play this game for 14 years now, my exp in past was that the ppl „that progress together“ are very few, because when you ie have TBC model, most are at actual raid, and the 10-25% percent players that catch up, are all in different progress steps and cant play with each other. rest is a few 1-3% per tier/attunement/etc you can play with.

or in short: in past standard was, if you arent at the front, you are fucked.

[Alkizon]

Progress is worse than useless unless most players can and do progress.

It never ceases to amaze me that players can claim that designs that exclude large numbers of players will somehow be good for the game. Has your personal entitlement blinded you to basic common sense?

What a blatant understanding of what has been said, your interpretation doesn't make any sense at all in this context, for the matter isn't in quantity, but in quality, in requirements for the player, and the further the more, and there is nothing like as your case... it doesn't means that there should be only few such people. Don't forget that we are talking about progress, and not about content in this case, although we should talk about them together, which brings us back to the question of design and motivation engine.

I repeat, progress is useless without demands, because this is becoming just usual “cinema”. Progress is essentially the overcoming of another "bar", but when the only bar is ilvl, then everything quickly and cheerfully loses its meaning.

ps. Well, how strange logic should be to distort so much what was said... you, man, have some kind of weird mind

--- Edit ---
Oh... *looks at activity of this subject throughout the whole thread* so there is nothing to talk about with you here, my friend. It's again these usual 4 "musketeers" here, as I can see. Well, then there is no point to discuss anything in principle, it will bury itself again. Don't even know what I really expected I devalue my answer, that's doesn't matter.

[Eggroll]

So why do you miss Pandaria then? The pacing then was just as it is now.

No, it was not.... MoP was the last decently crafted xpac WoW had. Everything after that was just shit. Granted, Legion was better than WoD, but BfA is just horrible in so many ways, it almost beats WoD in shittiness.

[cparle87]

I don’t quite get what your trying to say about cata raiding both the first tier and the second had a fair amount of new assets. First tier has new golems new hydra updates Nef and ony and new sinestra, If you looked at the interos there are Proabbly a lot of new stuff in them as well. Then you have fire lands which was filled to the brim with new stuff with almost every boss being new and only really the trash being things from other places which is comparable to most raids.

Tot4W was entirely assets we'd already seen in the dungeon. And BWD was yet another Blackrock Mountain raid using the same assets as... 3 raids and 3 dungeons is it now? I was going entire by the background and mob appearance in my statement. Art team basically recycled everything. As for Firelands almost everything is also copy/pasted from the Molten Front area. If you did your dailies there there isn't a mob, background tower, mountain cliff, etc that you haven't seen before. And of course Dragon Soul was a copy paste of Dragonblight with those creepy tentacle hole thingies from Twilight Highlands put in.

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There can be a middle ground, the design doesn't need to be one extreme or the other.

But it's not in Blizz's interests, especially with Activision watching them, to make very much content that not everyone can do. Everyone can hop into an arena, even if they're really bad and lose to even other bad people at a low ranking. Anyone should be able to walk into some form or every dungeon or raid and at least see what the bosses do, what npcs say, and what the storyline is.

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blizz made a huge mistake by making every item be "epic" purple color.

back in the old days my characters would be having a mix of green and blue equipment and getting a purple (epic) was an amazing experience.

Being able to completely deck your character out in epic gear from doing all the raids was a really cool thrill.

I truly dislike the fact that today you get purple items from literally anywhere... completely devalued the concept of epic.

People keep getting hung up on the color. The item quality is simply a multiplier that increases the budget for stats on the item. If you ever did pet battles, for instance, I have a good demonstration for you. A grey quality pet gets no bonus, white gets 5%, green 10%, blue 15%, and so on. If you took a green and a blue from the same xpac, same ilvl, and look at them side by side you'd see the blue simply had higher stats despite same ilvl.

[Akka]

Oh yeah? Do you honestly believe that? You could PUG a few bosses in AQ, you could PUG an entire wing in Naxx, and you only really needed MC level gear to do it. It really wasn't tuned tightly. The only reason you couldn't really anything in BWL was because of the massive tactical cockblock that the first boss was. If it wasn't for that you'd be able to faceroll most of BWL while being undergeared. Same deal in BC, same deal in Wrath, and so on. Pretty much every raid throughout the history of WoW has been tuned that at least a few bosses were easily doable with less than stellar gear. Try again.

Pugging an entire Naxx wing with random guys in MC gear ? Yeah, you'll forgive me if I have my doubts.
Pretty sure all the "pug" you're speaking of like if they were regular occurence are most probably either pure inventions, or special cases where people from big guilds pulled out their alt.

Also, going from "previous content is completely obsolete" to "well, you can maybe kill a one or two bosses in AQ" is pretty contradictory. You're pretty much proving your own point wrong here.

ps. Well, how strange logic should be to distort so much what was said... you, man, have some kind of weird mind

It's Osmeric. He has some obsession with reinventing reality so it can fit with what he wants to be true when it comes to WoW design. Has done this for years, and is completely impervious to any kind argument, even with facts slapping him in the face. You're wasting your time.

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People keep getting hung up on the color. The item quality is simply a multiplier that increases the budget for stats on the item.

Actually it doesn't even do that anymore. Today, color is literally meaningless, they removed the added budget in Cata IIRC.

[czarek]

Yes thats true. But it feels like this since MOP as i remember. They cut content and if you log back after 2 or 1 patch later your gear is pretty crap if it was mythic also. I remember vanilla and tbc gear system was pretty diffrent. Ofc a lot of ppl had better gear than yours but if i obtain for example full tier1 it was pretty good for all content. I dont have to farm full tier2 to go for an AQ. I could skip it an feel pretty powerfull still.

[cparle87]

Actually it doesn't even do that anymore. Today, color is literally meaningless, they removed the added budget in Cata IIRC.

Sauce? /10chars?
Legit curious.

[Rafoel]

Less stupid than less than 1% of players even seeing Kel'thuzad or Kil'jaeden BECAUSE there was only one "either you can do it or you can't" difficulty. Blizz flat out told us that the budget for the raiding department was getting slashed pretty heavily because it wasn't making up for the investment to even make the raids with the number of people who were seeing them. Look at Cataclysm. The entire first tier complete reused the art assets from other places; half of the second tier was removed and the other half was, again, reused assets entirely; and the third tier was also completely recycled. Lo and behold we get LFR in Dragon Soul, and things begin to turn around quite quickly with the variety and quality of raids in MoP.

Vanilla - subs growing rapidly
TBC - subs growing rapidly
WotLK - highest sub number ever... "hey you know guys, making raids just isnt worth it, we are cutting the budget"
Cata - massive subdrop 1st time in game history... "guys we need to increased the budget for raids again... but lets justify it with LFR!"
MOP - subs continue dropping...
WoD - ????
Legion, BFA - no profit

*shrugs*

When people like you say "raid quality dropped down" they generally mean "art quality dropped down", and you basically confirmed that in your post. Meanwhile, for people like me (dunno about you) art quality is the LEAST important thing in any game. If art was important I would never start playing games when I was a kid, everything looked like cubes.


Some time ago I became convinced that my dropping interest in WoW despite constant releases of content is my own problem, not game's problem. That with age the will for effort investment in insignificant games just naturally disappears. Yet recently I "discovered" a new (or old) MMO - which name I won't reveal to avoid pointless discussions whether its better or worse than WoW - just know that it got me invested so hard I forgot I could be so invested in a game. It's completely absurd that game with 50x less budget than WoW and 10x less content can feel so much better to play. And why does it feel better? The OP's argument is on point. It rewards me for my time spent, with concrete rewards, and concrete steps towards my goals. The development of my character is felt and measurable.

[Elias01]

i dont think so. we had that in the past. since i play this game for 14 years now, my exp in past was that the ppl „that progress together“ are very few, because when you ie have TBC model, most are at actual raid, and the 10-25% percent players that catch up, are all in different progress steps and cant play with each other. rest is a few 1-3% per tier/attunement/etc you can play with.

or in short: in past standard was, if you arent at the front, you are fucked.

I wasnt in front and i wasnt fucked. Thats not how it worked at all