Islands going forward

[prwraith]

Literally islands should just be a forgotten thing that happened once.

[TwoMana]

Because those features DO affect me, because they promote bad behavior, entitlement, and makes it so less players will be motivated to raid. The community is affected as a whole from those systems and when the community is affected, Im affected in the ripple effect.

Surely your community (your guild) has higher standards than that? I get it if you're a pugger, but then, if that bothers you, why not join a guild that has people who are birds of your feather?

Its not that the players want to rush, Yes there are those who wanna just get it over with, But you literally can not take your time because the other team, be it PVP or NPC will rush you. so if you dont rush, they win and you dont get any rewards.

Yes, it's hard to do on PvP island, that mode is competitive. Against computer AI, not so much. You have plenty of time to explore and potter around aimlessly.
The mode needs to have a purpose (collecting Azerite) so there are constraints you obviously can't stay there the whole evening, that would be silly. They have other types of content for that kind of exploration (normal zones, nazjatar, mechagon). Set your expectations accordingly.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

Islands were a decent idea somewhat sabotaged by Blizzard's not fully developing them out to be what they could really be (see: Garrisons, the original implementation of scenarios and tons of other things). So they're tossed into the game finished enough to play but not fully done, players find them bland (at least I did) and then it becomes a self-defeating prophecy. "They're garbage and shouldn't be in the game" is the usual response. The word gets around that they aren't that great and the feature dies on the vine.

Blizzard should carefully consider the stuff they put into the game as features, build it out properly and then keep it in the game as a fun theme park-style component. Ion has implied that temporary expansion features are going to be looked at in the future and I hope they are. As they are now they're a bit of a waste and entirely forgettable once another expansion rolls in.

I suspect development on islands suffers from an original idea that they were a BfA only feature and most of that single-expansion stuff never lives up to its promise.

That said, I occasionally do them and find them to be OK but not engaging enough to actually look forward to them. They are more in the category of something-to-do and as such sort of forgettable. The original idea was interesting if they had only built that instead of what they did.

Seems to me like Islands never managed to reach their original idea. The whole "random location, random spawns" never panned out and instead just became a small list of templates they cycle through, so Blizz tried to downplay that and instead play them up as this hard PvP-style content which players had no interest in and so everyone just outgeared normal and farmed normal for easy Azerite.

[MoanaLisa]

Seems to me like Islands never managed to reach their original idea. The whole "random location, random spawns" never panned out and instead just became a small list of templates they cycle through, so Blizz tried to downplay that and instead play them up as this hard PvP-style content which players had no interest in and so everyone just outgeared normal and farmed normal for easy Azerite.

As long as expansion-only features exist, Blizzard has no incentive to improve them. That's why they are bad. It's not just islands; it's everything that falls into this category.

I also agree 100% with @Nymrohd that putting a timer on them directly contradicts the idea of exploration. Sadly, it's easy to come to the conclusion that Blizzard does not believe that exploration as such--hunting for and finding things--is a core part of their MMO any longer. The core ideas seem to be competition through PVP and time-limited events and combat at every opportunity. I don't mind the latter, I do mind the former a lot.

[Slowpoke is a Gamer]

As long as expansion-only features exist, Blizzard has no incentive to improve them. That's why they are bad. It's not just islands; it's everything that falls into this category.

I also agree 100% with @Nymrohd that putting a timer on them directly contradicts the idea of exploration. Sadly, it's easy to come to the conclusion that Blizzard does not believe that exploration as such--hunting for and finding things--is a core part of their MMO any longer. The core ideas seem to be competition through PVP and time-limited events and combat at every opportunity. I don't mind the latter, I do mind the former a lot.

Honestly for whatever reason it feels like their .3 features are always more fleshed out and appeal much more to their audience than their .0 features. Yet they end up lasting less than half as long.

Just compare Islands with Horrific Visions, even this early on. One's a pseudo-PvP zerg that you'll finish in 10 minutes with a win every time, the other's this months-long pseudo-grind that you'll probably lose 50 times before you win. Yet the former's response is "it's terrible and I hope it rots in hell and never returns" and the latter's is "finally were was this patches ago."

[Shakana]

Wth the current situation of bfa now, it's less important to just "mine azerite", besides you wanting for some odd reason to still fill your HoA with AP. It should just stop growing on AP but whatever. I don't even know what to say anymore lol quite frankly.

[munkeyinorbit]

I really liked the idea of exploring semi-procedurally generated islands, filled with powerful mobs, hidden treasure and the chance to get rare loot.

I did not like the race to click on nodes and AOE down mobs on a harsh time limit that limited my ability to explore. Also making them, 100% mandatory was a sure fire way to make people not like them at all.

Islands were completly optional. I didn't like them and I decided not to do them. Optional. Idiots who think they were mandatory probably need to learn what mandatory means.

I didnt like the part where you had to race around, ignoring the exploration part of it. The islands that I did do early on had objectives where we would have to do something. No time. Got to go and kill 130 more mobs and do some mining. Boring AF.

[Azerate]

Yes, I do hope it will be possible to solo queue for them in the next expansion. Islands are probably one of the most hardcore mount grinds in wow history. It's possible the incoming 8.3 changes will make it a bit easier, but it's still crazy rng. I have only done about 800 islands in the whole expansion and I'm waiting for 8.3 now or possibly even 9.0 and beyond for blizz to make is somewhat easier, because the chances for mounts are ridiculously low. Islands themselves are not a bad feature, it's just the fact that you need to do like 6000-8000 of them to get all the mounts that is the annoying part.

And no, islands were obviously never mandatory for anyone. You could argue that their rewards (azerite) were made in such a way to incentivize a group of people to feel like they are mandatory, but in the end if you are one of those people it's entirely on you if you feel like you need to do 600 islands a week for that AP. And if you are this kind of a person, you shouldn't blame anyone but yourself for doing content you don't enjoy for hours on end. The only kind of obligatory part was the weekly cap - beyond that, if you wanted to run them 24/7 for whatever reason (be it AP or mounts), you could, but it was never mandatory.