Who lost its soul? Veteran Players or the Game?

[Big Thanks]

Ive been recently playing other games from different genres and i realized something.
I feel a weird sense on numbness when i play WoW.
And with other games i play i feel a crapton more engaged and immersed.

This is probably because ive played WoW for 1000's of hours and my mind is trained to play the game a certain way.
Like a war veteran on the battlefield or something. Completely numb to the danger and without "sense of wonder".

Do you think this is 100% my fault and im already brainwashed in some way?
or
Is the game also at fault a little bit? Did developers also lost their soul a little bit?

Do you still feel a sense of wonder when playing wow in this day and age of "information overload" and "google"?

[apelsinjuice]

its the players, and you can make 1 easy test. Go play classic and you will never get the same feeling you did when you played it as a kid

[Ghostile]

developers develop as the market changes, players don't.

It's easy to think the developers are blindly driving the game bad, but most likely the truth is that they know better what keeps the game floating.

[Saltysquidoon]

Maybe I'm a jaded cynic but I never felt a sense of wonder playing WoW.

I remember buying hyped as shit to quest in ashenvale and the felwood to explore those places from WCIII. I felt the same about seeing Alterac or the swamp of sorrows (the black morass) from WCII. I think that there was or is a large minority of veteran players (especially veteran players) who are warcraft fans not WoW fans.

As for WoW itself, everyone not knowing anything about anything certainly made the world feel bigger at first but if we're being real there is only so long you can sustain that even without datamining.

[GR8GODZILLAGOD]

Not really "lost their soul". People's tastes change when they get older and the game has changed over the years as well. My tastes in games have changed as I grew up and how I played them as well.

[Sting]

The developers? Everything in "modern" WoW is made to keep you logged in and churn out those MAU's for Gobby Kotick and his precious shareholders. That is understandable and the way it's always been to a certain extent, it's just that the activities that keep you logged in have over time become a banal slog. You're very heavily encouraged to keep logging in EVERY SINGLE DAY to keep up with the latest grind, whether it's AP, essences, currency for cloak upgrades or just plain old gold. You know those "free" games where you yourself are actually the product for the corporation? That's what modern wow feels like, except you even pay to play wow.

Catchup mechanisms either don't exist or come way too late for people who cba with all the fluff that is required to keep up with todays raiding / competitive m+ environment. I'm excited for Shadowlands, where "loot will be loot" again apparently. I'm still holding off on buying it and probably won't until I get to play the alpha / beta. First sign of whatever bullshit grind they've come up with this time around to keep me churning out MAUs, and I'm skipping this one.

[Drusin]

I don't know about losing their soul but I'd say players. It's no different than real life if you live a routine monotonous life. I remember my first time seeing Knucklerot in Ghostlands and Stitches in Duskwood and Fel Reaver in HFP and being like "oh shit!" and getting wrecked by them lol. Now, even if they somehow catch me unaware AND manage to kill me idc and the same goes for any new mob Blizz would add. The game will never ever feel like it felt when I was new and that's down to experience and no fault of Blizzards.

[Ghostile]

The developers? Everything in "modern" WoW is made to keep you logged in and churn out those MAU's for Gobby Kotick and his precious shareholders.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't making a good game make the most money for them?

[Sting]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't making a good game make the most money for them?

Being good for the players and being good for the shareholders aren't always the same thing.

Edit:Here's just one example. If you played Legion you probably know about the addon that grouped players together for world quests to make the tedious AP grind a little faster. This game at its core is about playing efficient and grouping for those WQs made it *VERY* efficient, timewise. Sure, you had leechers who contributed nothing but overall for me it was an enjoyable player-made feature. Cue end of Legion, the addon was broken on purpose because "people were doing the """content""" faster than the timeframe that Blizzard had in mind. There's an actual quote from one of the devs around that time, I think it's in one of the interviews. That's content literally designed to be a timesink. Great for shareholders because people are online for longer, bad for players because the reward to time invested ratio shifts negatively.

Edit2: Not to mention the meme that they literally said "well if you're gonna be grouping, we'll have to increase the amount of mobs you're required to kill from 5 to 30" and yet here we are, addon broken and still some horrible "fill the bar" quests giving 1-3% per mob kill. Atrocious design.

[Ghostile]

Being good for the players and being good for the shareholders aren't always the same thing.

I mean, if the players like it, doesn't that make the most money?

Good for players -> more players -> more money?

[Sting]

I mean, if the players like it, doesn't that make the most money?

Good for players -> more players -> more money?

See the edit(s) I made. I'm sure there's more I can think of.

[Ghostile]

See the edit(s) I made. I'm sure there's more I can think of.

You're going to have to explain to me how people who grind WQs make more money than people who raidlog.

[Laughingjack]

I think its a bit of both but more the game if I am being honest.

WoW has over time tried to appeal more and more to a wider audience at the cost of what the game was. The result is a much diminished experience for everyone involved.

The high end player has to slog though hour upon hours of content so utterly below their skill level it begs the question why there isn't a auto complete feature for them. This build contempt towards the lower skilled players as suddenly the thing barring them from their preferred mode (be it mythic, glad, mythic+). Is days worth of grinding content not meant for them.

This in turn gives most lower end players a feeling of resentment from never really getting a chance to learn how the game works. Systems put in place for extremely valid reasons are seen as pointless gate keeping as the divide between high end players and low end has never been higher.

I think at some point wow just has to decide what it wants to be.

[Sting]

You're going to have to explain to me how people who grind WQs make more money than people who raidlog.

It's statistics for the company / shareholders. People logging in more often and staying online longer are indicators of how likely those people are to keep playing and thus how well your game will be doing financially. That doesn't mean they're having fun, that's completely out of that equation.

[A Chozo]

Both, of course it's both

Veteran players are a goddamn curse to deal with, and the game makers want their money too so the game design suffers for it, breeding more of those players.

[TorAndre]

its the players, and you can make 1 easy test. Go play classic and you will never get the same feeling you did when you played it as a kid

I get the same feeling when play classic now as when I was 20

[Rucati]

its the players, and you can make 1 easy test. Go play classic and you will never get the same feeling you did when you played it as a kid

Yup, I loved vanilla WoW when I was in high school. Played classic and couldn't make it past level 25. Mindlessly grinding hundreds of mobs looking for 10 livers or whatever made me wanna rip my eyes out. Yet when I was a kid I thought the game as a whole was so cool I didn't even notice the grind was that bad.

And honestly I don't think any game will ever get me to put up with a grind like that again. Maybe the first fully VR MMO that's amazing or something where it's just so much fun being in the game that what you're doing doesn't matter, but considering we're like 50+ years away from a game like that existing it's safe to say I'll never see it.

[Ghostile]

It's statistics for the company / shareholders. People logging in more often and staying online longer are indicators of how likely those people are to keep playing and thus how well your game will be doing financially. That doesn't mean they're having fun, that's completely out of that equation.

I'd say it's dumb to think they are thinking "How do we maximize the time our subs have to spend playing?" instead of "How do we maximize the number of subs that keep playing"

[Sting]

And honestly I don't think any game will ever get me to put up with a grind like that again. Maybe the first fully VR MMO that's amazing or something where it's just so much fun being in the game that what you're doing doesn't matter, but considering we're like 50+ years away from a game like that existing it's safe to say I'll never see it.

Even with Moore's Law approaching physical limitations, I'm sure technology will keep advancing at an incredible fast rate. It'll be way faster than 50 years, especially since we already have VR tech, it's just not very good yet.

- - - Updated - - -

I'd say it's dumb to think they are thinking "How do we maximize the time our subs have to spend playing?" instead of "How do we maximize the number of subs that keep playing"

Well, obviously it's not a binary one or the other kinda thing.

[Kokolums]

its the players, and you can make 1 easy test. Go play classic and you will never get the same feeling you did when you played it as a kid

Classic is massively screwed up with layers and ginormous servers. With so many players on each server, you never run into the same people twice so it has the same feel as retail where everyone is anonymous. And any time a group of people start congregating somewhere and doing something social, a big red alarm goes off at Blizzard and they activate layers to break it up and force people to solo again.

Hard to get immersed in THAT crap. They need to erase WoW classic, throw layers and huge servers in the trash, and start over.