Modern WoW is too hardcore

[RumbleShakes]

Thanks man, havnt laughed so hard for a while. What a shambles.

Thanks for saying nothing on why. You must be a millennial or looked into a mirror.

[HuxNeva]

Imagine if Blizzard kept wow as classic is since 2005 up until now. No changes. How would that look like?

Crickets chirping

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Wtf is hardcore about modern wow? The mythic raids which only 0.00001% do? SUCH A HARDCORE GAME! The +20 mythic dungeons that again only 0.0001% do? Totally a hardcore game. Meanwhile you can put a disabled monkey to level and gear up to heroics raids ilvl by bashing its head on the keyboard through wq/lfr.

Go ahead, grind up to HC raids ilvl, even HC raid base ilvl, by grinding lfr/wq. See you in a decade. HF!

[crono14]

You can say literally all of what you just said though about vanilla raiding too. And 12,000 kills on Jaina is a lot to you?

Compared to the fact that 21,000 killed the first boss? So somewhere along the way, 9,000 guilds have given up or not made it to Jaina yet. You can see the numbers dropping off, starting specifically at conclave actually even, as each boss seems to have a 1k drop before that with Conclave being about double that.

I randomly picked the first guild off your list you linked - https://raider.io/guilds/us/skywall/...20the%20Wicked -
This guild killed Jaina heroic but never bothered to kill Normal. This guild also probably stopped raiding as their last kill of the Restless Cabal was a month ago so they will likely never kill Uu'nat and will always show as a statistic of not killing it. The data is meaningless without investigating each guild and what is going on with them. Linking websites with data without a way to provide relevant context is pointless.

Honestly yeah with how many people probably quit the game due to BFA's problems, that is a lot of guilds. Again you are assuming those 9,000 guilds even cared to kill Jaina or move to a higher difficulty. Maybe their guild died on the way there or they have no intention or trying to kill Jaina or move to a higher difficulty? You really have to go investigate each guild one by one to try and infer why they haven't done something.

It's the exact in Vanilla, I never said it was any different. Maybe some guild was fine just doing BWL and never going to AQ40 and instead did AQ20 in 2 groups. Maybe they never finished AQ40 and guild broke up or they just didn't care. Who knows.

[hortrorog]

I could list the differences between Classic and Retail which make it more hardcore (Attunements, Multiple Raid Gear Progression Requirements, Travel Times, Constant Reagent management). But the amount of QoL changes speak for themselves. Retail is a lot less hardcore than what Classic demanded out of its player base.

thats not hardcore, thats just more time consuming

[Marxman]

If modern WoW was being designed for the hardcore player, then it stands to reason that hardcore players would enjoy it. Hardcore players and raiders are among the most vocal critics of modern WoW... so your argument doesn't really make a lot of sense.

I think the problem is that they abandoned the middle. They're designing the game for grandmas who just want to farm transmog and mounts, and World First raiders who want to grind their balls off 10 hours a day in M+ and WQs. If you're someone in-between those 2 extremes, there's very little content designed for you in BfA. What is there is wholly unsatisfying because of the class design and loot systems that are in place.

[crusadernero]

Crickets chirping

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Go ahead, grind up to HC raids ilvl, even HC raid base ilvl, by grinding lfr/wq. See you in a decade. HF!

I think alot of people want stuff that aint really hard, but requires time. Alot, if not most, of classic requires alot more time than high end skill.

People want it to rely more on time invested, than the players skill.

And tbh, this game is supposed to be a MMORPG so relying on time invested is(was) sort of expected.

[Vorkreist]

Crickets chirping

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Go ahead, grind up to HC raids ilvl, even HC raid base ilvl, by grinding lfr/wq. See you in a decade. HF!

You won't see me do that grind because I'm not a 2h a week pokemon hunter who buys every garbage in the blizzard shop for EPIC COLLECTIONS of Pixels. Thats the last few pathetic tasteless whales still fueling Bfa and giving Ion's an excuse not the get fired instantly.

[Nixiuz]

Thanks, I'm enjoying my Cutting Edge for quite a while now. You?

RDF achievements.

[peepthetech]

everyones sick of immersion-less theme-park hand-holding garbage. Give us a world we don't know anything about and let us discover.

That is why people want classic back. Although they won't get what they are looking for

[Guardian Bob]

It absolutely blows my mind that anyone actually believes this.

My mind is blown that you don't.

[Charge me Doctor]

Whooosh... you totally missed my point. Here's the point: if every tier comes with super easy content catering to extremely casual players, it's always going to be more efficient for more advanced players to gear up by doing exclusively super easy content until there's no super easy content left to do. Which means that the release of every new tier makes all but the most advanced content trivial.

It won't, your premise is false on a basis of "super easy content" providing shit rewards. This "super easy content" is just a "adventure mode", so you'll see cutscenes ingame instead of going to youtube (probably, i don't believe that i've even stepped in LFR for, like, two years)

If you chose to do "super easy content" for gear - you are doing it wrong and simply waste your time. By the time you'll obtain "proper" gear from "super easy content" the expansion will be over.

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Where I said, "for example, in raids" I was basically saying "imagine you had a brand new toon and the only way to gear up was raiding, and it was the 4th tier and you just dinged." Then you would do LFR of the lowest tier, and when you were done with that progress to the next tier, etc. You would never choose to do harder content from an older tier in place of easy content from a newer tier. Which means that the below current content, most people are doing a lot of stuff designed for extremely casual players (that was often even nerfed when the new tier came out).

So you are imagining things now, because you have no leg to stand on? Gearing up doesn't work like that, if you have a "brand new toon", there are multiple ways to gear up, raiding should be the last place you'd look at (same way as in vanilla, by the way - unless your guild runs "alt raids" to gear people up you have to spam dungeons and buy crafted stuff.

The only way to counter that is to make it more efficient to do hard content when you're gearing up and below cutting edge. They've done that somewhat with M+, but not with raids. Which again, is why you never really see people gearing their alts by running heroic Uldir or whatever (behavior you definitely would see in Classic). But that approach just means you blow through the content because a lot of people will do the "get gear fast doing hard content" thing, then go do the easy content, and just get a ton of gear.

You do higher difficulty raids - you get better gear, it works as intended. Reason why people do gear their alts in heroic raids is because they can and they (as a guild) often outgear it, if that would happen in vanilla they (people who outgear a raid) would just cancel their sub until next raid is released (because there is no reason to do content that gives you no r, because there is nothing to do, but with titanforge they themselves decide to keep running the treadmill.

Point remains: difficulty levels means that it's extremely difficult to having meaningful progression in old content because the newer, easier, more rewarding content invalidates it all.

Like it literally always used to be in wow. Do you think people were raiding MC back in 1.11 vanilla to get gear? No, as soon as you ding 60 you join your guilds AQ20 (or sometimes ZG) run groups and play dead for duration of most fights while gear that would be otherwise DEd showers onto you.

How the hell "newer" content is somehow "easier" escapes my mind completely.

If you seriously expect to go through whole "first you level to cap, their you do dungeons, then you do tier 1 raid, then you do tier 2 raid" etc - you definitely missed living in a pug world since vanilla to probably late wotlk. Chances of you finding a group willing to do old raids is minuscule, because you are late to the party and most players have moved on to next tier.

[cparle87]

I would argue the exact opposite. Todays wow is too softcore. It spoonfeeds us content in an effort to drag out our subscriptions.

Two days into bfa i reached a point where there was litterarly nothing to do on my main. all the dungeons were cleared and it was not possible to run them again this reset.
All the quests that existed in the game was done. The world Q map was clean and it would be another 5 hours until the next batch spawned.

You could always try sleeping, eating, and bathing.

[MikeBogina]

Classic is more hardcore in the sense that it requires far more time and there's literally none of the quality of life changes in it. You didn't get showered with gear and upgrades like you do now(getting gear in Classic was rare in 40 man raids).

However so much information about Classic that we didn't know about back then, we do know now. Anyone who says the bosses were harder, doesn't understand that it wasn't the bosses themselves, but the players and lack of knowledge we had available at the time.

If they allow mods, which I'm sure they will, Classic raids are going to be a cake walk. It's just the time investment which is going to take awhile. Don't expect to see people in full epics, just because the bosses are dying fast.

[Detritivores]

This is absolutely right. They've constructed the content of retail not on how much time you're willing to invest, but your innate skill level. The last boss in a mythic is tuned such that only a certain percentage of players have the skill required. They're segregating people based on WoW IQ basically.

In Vanilla, it was mostly how much time you were willing to invest for consumables and preparation that determined your success in a raid environment. Lots of people that would be considered way below average now could go very far in Naxxramas just because they were willing to devote a greater portion of their time to the game.

Is this seriously desirable? A lot of modern WoW players have enjoyed the game and continue to remain subbed in the face of unimpressive content (myself included) because we enjoy doing things that require a lot of skill and a group. That's actually all we do. And then we log off and spend time on our careers and families.

Why should players progress with mindless grinding? If they invested half that time in learning to actually play the game, they could actually progress in hard content. The idea that a game is "too hardcore" because you have to learn to play it to beat the hardest content it has to offer rather than just rolling your face on the keyboard as a full time job is absurd. So your target demographic for WoW is the unemployed?

[Charge me Doctor]

I think you again missed my point. What I'm arguing is very basic - that the constant release of super easy catch up content invalidates older content, but that they're kind of boxed in to doing this because they're catering to so many different difficulty levels playing current content.

I'm not saying you can do super easy content forever and get amazing gear. I'm saying that until you reach current content, you can do the easy stuff to get better gear pretty quickly and that's what most people end up doing, whether leveling, dungeons, whatever.

In Classic, catch up didn't really exist, you had to do MC on the same difficulty level as the people who originally progressed in there in order to move on to BRS. If classic had difficulty levels, you would do LFR MC > LFR BWL > LFR AQ > LFR Naxx > Normal Naxx > Heroic Naxx > Mythic Naxx.

Or since you seem triggered by me saying "LFR", just pretend I said "Normal". I don't care, the point is the same.

And what catch-up mechanics have to do with "super easy content" you was talking about in last post then? Your point sounds more and more like an electron.
Off course new content invalidates old content, it's how it is since the creation of WoW. It has nothing to do with raid difficulty settings.

So, working as intended and as it used to be since... ever.

In vanilla catch up pretty much exists, you didn't ran MC to "get gear" in late vanilla, because you already have your ZG and AQ raids available. If you'd play in vanilla you'd fucking understand that it was almost impossible to find people actually raiding MC , because everyone moved on already and gear up their toons in more appropriate place. Vanilla didn't required to to progress from damn dungeons through MC/BWL to AQ and eventually into naxx, you just went to ZG and AQ in your crappy blues/greens, got bunch of loot and joined your progress raids (again, depends from guild to guild. If your guild was one of dem "serious guilds" you'd just poach geared players and skip that whole "lets boost our new guys through AQ20 next week!"

[Extremities]

I think the main reason retail World of Warcraft fails to replicate the success of vanilla is because it's too hardcore. Or rather, because it's developers are too hardcore.

The current game director of World of Warcraft, Ion Hazzikostas, used to be the GM of Elitist Jerks. In other words, he was the guild master of what used to one of the best guilds in the game, one that successfully cleared Naxxramas 40-man back in the day.

Temporarily going off the topic of Ion, the major difference between classic and current Warcraft is this: classic was simple but time-consuming, retail is mostly simple and quick with some very hard components (raiding).

In modern Warcraft once players reach something they can't progress past, in this case heroic/mythic raiding, they quit. They either aren't good enough or don't feel like they're making as much progress as they would like. In vanilla Warcraft players could continue as far as they liked. The gameplay was simple enough for anyone to go through, but the content was drawn out enough that people wouldn't run out of it.

The conclusion you can take from these two scenarios is important. If a game makes a player feel inadequately skilled, they will be offended and quit. If it makes them feel like they need to spend more time in order to be the best, they will spend more time. Our ego protects us from the truth of a lack of mastery/skill in raiding by reacting like this, despite how both options involve time investment.

But can you really say this thought process is true for Ion himself? As stated above, he was one of the most hardcore players back in the day, and continues to aid in the development of incredibly hard mythic content today. Such a person would be likely to consider challenging yourself and defeating the most difficult of encounters a great accomplishment. Consequentially, they would likely find it internally satisfying to do so. This is the problem with retail's design.

If the game director derives accomplishment from skillful play/difficult content, then will he understand how players who don't do so feel? Players who derive accomplishment near exclusively from external factors are foreign to him.

tl;dr - game director derives accomplishment from more internal sources, and as such doesn't understand classic, which is diametrically opposed to that idea of how to give the player accomplishment when in comparison to current wow.

Im sorry but retail WoW too hardcore? Is this post a joke or what?

I can log in for 5 minutes and obtain epics. WoW is TOO fuckin easy. When the highest quality loot is handed out like candy on Halloween, there's nothing hardcore about it. Nothing at all.

[Charge me Doctor]

Isn't it clear that when I reference "catch up" and "super easy content" I'm talking about the same thing? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here.

Ok fine, I didn't play Vanilla, maybe the catch up was ZG, I don't care. But you have to admit that their catering to casuals in live has meant that the catch up and just basic pre-current tier process has gotten much easier. You're talking about getting carried to current, which I'm sure happened to some people, but given how few people made it to Naxx at all I find it hard to believe that being carried was as prevalent and easily accessible as you seem to describe.

No, it's not, because it's completely different things.

Their "catering to casuals" is what actually made vanilla successful and popular. People were swarming to WoW because:
a) It was warcraft
b) It was way more casual-friendly than any other MMO on the market.
Few people made it to the naxx mostly because:
a) how gated it was
b) how noninclusive "proper" raiding guilds were (good fucking luck getting into something decent raiding-speaking without being stocked with gear already)
c) how hard it was to get information about raids from third parties
d) how many players weren't even into raiding in vanilla
"Being carried" was, basically, the only way you could gear up a new toon up in late vanilla, unless you played on the best server in the world.

Going back to the first sentence of my original post:

"You just can't have multiple difficulties that extend down to something as easy as LFR coexisting with a paradigm where there's progression below the highest level."

You definitely can, that's how difficulty in most games works. You have access to "easy" difficulty, you have "nightmare" difficulty, and there are multiple difficulties in between. You imply here that "optimal" way to take on those games would be playing on "easy" until you can play "nightmare" difficulty, instead of, i don't know, starting at "normal", getting some skills up, then restarting on "hard" and sitting there for some time and when you feel confident, get your ass ravaged in "nightmare" difficulty.

Look at dwarf fortress for example, you have option to pick the safest start in the generated world, where nothing can hurt you (except RNG and, you know... dwarves themselves, that's part of the fun). Or you can pick "hardest" start in some nightmarish lands, where fat and hair of butchered animals goes back to life and kills your butcher. Your implication of "if the easiest mode exists there is no point in doing any other difficulty mode except the hardest one" is ridiculous.

"If" you are talking about catch-up mechanics - they exist because they make sense. Expecting players to do outdated content is ridiculous, the game is linear, when a group X finishes content A and accumulates enough gear to move on to content B, no other player will be able to catch up with group X. Because there will be no players to form a group Z to clear content A before moving on to content B with content C in sight. Blizzard realized that players will just drop out of doing stuff and implemented catch up.
You want to know why we have such a shitty leveling experience these days in wow? For the same fucking reason. You can't expect players to spend 1/4th of expected expansion lifetime just to level their toon to level 60, and without various "catch up mechanics" (aka - experience required cuts) that would mean about a year of sub just to level to expansion you have bought to play - it's ridiculous and unsustainable idea that will bleed players.

Wow is a huge game world, but 99% of it is piss easy and completely dead. That's the big issue here.

Exactly, fully agree with that (except "the dead" part - don't even know what you mean here), but that's not "the big issue" here, it's fucking main feature of WoW, it's supposed to be piss easy, it's supposed to be a chillax game, that's what made it different from other MMORPGs

[KaPe]

Im sorry but retail WoW too hardcore? Is this post a joke or what?

I can log in for 5 minutes and obtain epics. WoW is TOO fuckin easy. When the highest quality loot is handed out like candy on Halloween, there's nothing hardcore about it. Nothing at all.

You can log in for 5 minutes and obtain shit epics. Nobody cares you got 385 from random world quest - especially since that stuff will be irrelevant in a month or so. The highest quality loot is still locked behind the most difficult content. It will be obvious once new raid releases, mythic raiders ilvl will skyrocket and other people will be slowly catching up for months.

[Charge me Doctor]

You can log in for 5 minutes and obtain shit epics. Nobody cares you got 385 from random world quest - especially since that stuff will be irrelevant in a month or so. The highest quality loot is still locked behind the most difficult content. It will be obvious once new raid releases, mythic raiders ilvl will skyrocket and other people will be slowly catching up for months.

Following that logic you could log in vanilla, and "obtain epics" by browsing AH for T1 bracers or krol blades. The argument of purple item names always makes me giggle

[Soikona]

I could list the differences between Classic and Retail which make it more hardcore (Attunements, Multiple Raid Gear Progression Requirements, Travel Times, Constant Reagent management). But the amount of QoL changes speak for themselves. Retail is a lot less hardcore than what Classic demanded out of its player base.

I wouldn’t consider hardcore being the same as time spent. For me, it’s difficulty and the only truly difficult thing in vanilla is leading 39 people successfully.