Originally Posted by
Huzzaa
He's not wrong though.
A friend of mine quit during 2008 and he literally said: "RIP game, Activision..." something something, the point was exactly what it had started to turn into during Wrath. An easy game. Aka. the accessibility that rapidly started flowing in.
Wrath I personally enjoyed a lot myself but TBC awed me way more than Wrath ever did.
I would say the same Nitros said. The actual golden age, was started in BC, lasted through it into Wrath but Wrath quickly proved the point on where the game started heading after.
I do give Actit#ash a few more points for still keeping the game good up until the end of MoP, after which it was botched quite seriously(Cata doesn't even compare, the only bad thing there, was DS being smaller than a typical end raid, that's it) and Legion was pretty cool but looking back at it personally, that thing burned me out by then end of EN M.
I hope they bring it back to a playable fun state of a game, but currently, they're not able to do it I think.
Specifically to what's happening at this day.
On another note.
A few days ago I started thinking about compiling my own TBC server. Doing some development work on that front and perhaps even considering on attempts to balance the thing. This mind exercise brought me to a realization though when I started thinking about loot balance.
The TBC model was a nice ladder-step between raids and tiers where you're constantly putting pieces to use from the previous and it flows together with attunements. I had an idea in my head of actually rolling things out exactly like they were, patch by patch. It would've been so cool. Then I compared it in my mind to the thing today, specifically regarding to loot balance. The thoughts I had regarding this hypothetical server were that I do as I said, but then thought about PvP gear ruining it(because most open-source server code sits in the latest patch, where the pvp gear is obtainable, meaning that even if you close off Sunwell, they'll still get inflated and invalidated by Brutal gear, making Gruuls and Maggy pointless). And here is the crux.
The current retail model, is NOT manageable, in any way. Think about it. How do you manage these random procs, these random sockets and all the other stuff. You could do statistical analysis, but the outliers will always be present and they will brutally murder anyones motivation when people see others who have put in 0 effort achieving the same as them or often better. (heroic raider sees a normal raider with items up to M ilvl, where's the fairness in that?). There is no way, in any scenario that it's manageable.
This mind exercise brought me to the conclusion that their only place where they can sort of manage and administrate the thing, is at the high end. The mythic end. You can kind of balance it there because you know that roughly, these people will not vary wildly 10 or 20 ilvls higher or lower like the folks raiding normal mode might. So you can kind of balance activities around it that are specifically for them. I.E. mythic raids. But even here, you can clearly notice from the last few iterations of raids in these 2 previous expansions(After M+ became a thing) of how utterly nonsensically tuned some of the last bosses are(to prevent them from being rolled over). Kil'Jaeden being a good example from ToS. Same really for the current expansions end-bosses.
It shows how loot is not really a factor in progression anymore, which is actually really bad in my mind.
I don't know if I'll even post this, I often do these long write ups and just delete them afterwards knowing how dumb people are and how many tend to strawman everything paragraph by paragraph but I guess the point is short and simple.
The game sux right now. It's not only the loot, but the loot is the biggest problem. The reward system.