Who lost its soul? Veteran Players or the Game?

[MoanaLisa]

I think the MAUs as a metric for successful game design really started in Legion personally.

MAU's are completely pointless for game design. If you log in once for...20 seconds....in some calendar month. That counts as 1 MAU.

If you log in 65 times in a calendar month and play for hours every day: That also counts as 1 MAU.

So the idea that grindy game design is some indication of player approval is bullshit. Monthly active users is just that: a count of how many accounts that accessed the game in a month.

[Ontis]

Both. But the game degraded first.

[Lazuli]

The devs sold out to appeal to the "majority" of casuals who have no intention of remaining loyal customer but some quick insta gratification.

That backfired, now we may see the soul return. It is definitely not the players who lost anything other than a game they once loved, in the end we're just gamers looking for something fun to fuck around in. Can't do that in a boring treadmill of endless bullshit. Players are jaded for good reason and should never be blamed for devs being at fault.

[Holdodlig]

Huh? Words have meaning you know, right?

I perfectly know the definitions of "veteran". And again, people calling themselves veterans in a game are the lost one.

[Byleth]

MAU's are completely pointless for game design. If you log in once for...20 seconds....in some calendar month. That counts as 1 MAU.

If you log in 65 times in a calendar month and play for hours every day: That also counts as 1 MAU.

So the idea that grindy game design is some indication of player approval is bullshit. Monthly active users is just that: a count of how many accounts that accessed the game in a month.

I wonder how many times you have to repeat this until people understand.

I bet you have this response in a notepad somewhere to copy/paste by now, I've definitely seen it before. :P

[Hctaz]

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"?

Honestly I thought it was a "me" thing, but Classic WoW has kinda shown me that it isn't.

I have to say that it really does feel like the game has lost its soul. I think the biggest change was that the world became less of a world and more of a themepark as time went on. Asmongold made a comment in some video a while ago about how every single nook and cranny is designed to be used for something inside of the modern expansions, and I have to agree. It feel like if they make a mountain village then that mountain village is tied to quests, and to dailies, and to the raid, and nothing is just... THERE. It's all meticulously planned out so that every little cave has a purpose. I also feel like there's less and less time to explore because of all of these like.. incentives to play the game. If I don't complete this emissary in 3 days it goes away. If I don't finish this world quest then I've lost some additional reputation that others players could have gotten. If I don't do every single world quest every single day in both assaults then I'm a few days behind other players... like... There's no time to breathe in retail anymore. I feel like I can log in to Classic and can go DO things without feeling like I'm missing out on something else. Whatever else I could be doing in Classic will still be there once I'm done adventuring further into some spooky cave.

[Doffen]

MAU's are completely pointless for game design. If you log in once for...20 seconds....in some calendar month. That counts as 1 MAU.

If you log in 65 times in a calendar month and play for hours every day: That also counts as 1 MAU.

So the idea that grindy game design is some indication of player approval is bullshit. Monthly active users is just that: a count of how many accounts that accessed the game in a month.

If we got one dollar each Moana for everytime someone misused the term MAU we would be drunk together on an island we bought for that money.

[Revak]

For me: the game doesn’t try to engage me anymore, it tries to keep me busy.

[catalystical]

It's both.

I'm not the same person I was 10 years ago. Back in the day I would also relish taking mowing down other people in Wintergrasp or DOTA. These days I just don't have the appetite for organised raiding and PvP anymore.

To a certain extend it's the same with Final Fantasy VII Remake. I don't really want a strict recreation of the old game in today's graphics. I like what they did and changed the game to suit this era of gaming behaviors. Blizzard for better and for worse has evolved the game through the years based on how we players play the game. They kinda lost it every now and then though. So Blizzard is at fault for this part.

[deadman1]

I perfectly know the definitions of "veteran". And again, people calling themselves veterans in a game are the lost one.

Someone saying they've played a game for a long time is bad? k bud

[Velshin]

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.

That maybe true and I agree with you. But can I ask you a question? why then when I played Witcher 3 or the latest Trial of Mana I got that feeling and old sensation of wonder back (like when we were children and played the JRPG for the first time). Doesn't that speak for the quality of the game itself?

[Big Thanks]

I perfectly know the definitions of "veteran". And again, people calling themselves veterans in a game are the lost one.

Feel free to share with us how i should call people who play wow for 10+ years without demeaning them.

Im waiting.

[last1214]

Im pretty happy with classic, and am sure I'll be happy with TBC. Has retail lost its soul? Idk, for me it just isnt fun anymore.

[Yriel]

Well if you believe the developers, the players have pushed all those things.

Players pushed for QoL changes, players complained about too many buttons, players wanted to be able to do content with their friends regardless of class (‘bring the player not the class‘), players thought all the stats on gear were confusing and didn’t know when an upgrade was an upgrade

People literally ask for everything. More crafting, less crafting, same amount of crafting, more raids, less raids, same amount of raids....
The question is who do the devs listen to.
And that is apparently the raiders, basically every point of his list was a complaint of raiders.
Crafting was to grindy and too time-intensive for them so it got neutered.
Rotations were to complex with all the Raid encounter stuff so classes got pruned.
Class Synergies made some classes better in some raids encounters (shaman stacking) so those were removed.
Complex stats on gear made gearing the raid more difficult and required longer farming of already beaten bosses so those were removed.

I doubt that many casual players had problems with any of the items on the list. Blizz balances its game around raids, if you don't like it, don't play it.

[korijenkins]

I expect most people to say both, but the reality is that the players never asked for many of the things Blizzard added to the game, nor did they ask for many of the "improvements" made to certain aspects of it.

How many changes were made to the PvP gearing system over the course of 5 expansions? 5? How many unnecessary difficulties were added to PvE content? 4?

The game changed to appeal to a general audience, rather than trying to remain the MMORPG game it always had been. That was where it lost its soul.

[Yriel]

When i say "i dont feel rewarded for reading the quest" i dont mean receiving rewards (-__-)
"Rewarded" in the sense of the quest becoming easier or finding new things or unlocking a secret information dump.

I dont understand the concept of designing 500 lifeless quests.

Because they are lifeless with the odd interesting one where you are rewarded with a "laugh" or a "woooh thats interesting"

They had all of this. In Vanilla you had to read the quest text to find the objectives (que mankriks wife memes) and people hated it. Sites like thotbot or add-ons that marked the quest objectives on the maps were super popular. So Blizz added them, now the quest text is just fluff. I still read it the first time i do the quests because i like all the small stories.

Also you can't compare a single player RPG with a MMO. Yes it may have been cool when you entered the name in the computer and found the person but if you had constant "Where is person X" spam followed by "Third level room 317" in chat and had 10 people in a queue in front of the computer, each of them telling everyone else to hurry up it would probably not have the same level of immersion.

[Coldkil]

Both.

The game changed. Its structure is no more carrot and stick, but a sort of mobile gaming inspired clusterfuck of systems made just to bloat the amount of activities in game, giving people the illusion of "choice" and "content". It sure is done with a purpose - namely keep people playing and paying. It's not wrong per se, but while some stuff improved an awful lot during the years (like the art style), other things became more and more like being an hamster on the wheel. We went from "log in to do X" to "log in to do X so you can do Y so you can do Z and if you miss a day you're fucked".

Anyway, players did their part. Less social, more focused on "progressing" (= burn through everything as fast as possible) and virtual competitions no one actually has put in game, like the latest iteration with r.io (which is an objectively good system, only used very badly). To the majority of players what you do doesn't matter anymore until you have a "tangible" proof that you're better/ahead of someone else. So devs just follow this route, giving people more and more artificial ladders to climb for the sake of it, adding nothing of value to the game.

Imho this is why WoW changed. I still like it, and every time i say i won't play anymore i end logging back in, mostly because farming tokens is easy - if i had to pay, i wouldn't log in. The core playstyle is good, i like raiding and being part of a group. But apparently i'm nothing more than an exception, because the more i try the more i find myself struggling behind people who manage to do literally everything in game (and my idea is that they have more than me only a good amount of free time).

[Dadwen]

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.

Honestly if I could play something close to my Ranged survival hunter that was near it's LK-MOP design I would resub in a heartbeat, other changes like the scaling takes some of the fun the game used to have too, going into dangerous higher zones or the fun of rollo-stomping old mobs that used to give you a hard time. I really think the current dev's in their pursuit of streamlining and their version of "balance" *especially class design, have sucked a lot of fun out of the game.

[oland138]

I think it could be both, but I don't think having an easy mode for everything helped with this at all. It's a completely different experience when the path of least resistance is also the most difficult. When the first time you experience a dungeon or raid is the hardest.

Yes, vanilla doesn't feel the same going back.... because we already did it. If they made fresh content with the same design philosophy it would absolutely recapture that feeling.

[Ontis]

I perfectly know the definitions of "veteran". And again, people calling themselves veterans in a game are the lost one.

>RF:Yogg
>RF:Alg
>RF:A'noob
>RF:LK
>RF:Goldies
How very sad that I still don't qualify as a game veteran. Alas, poor Yorick.

But yeah, you're partially correct there. Assuming that being one of the twenty men who spearheaded the community's advance against freshly released content no longer grants any personal recognition, there is no such thing as 'veteran WoW player'. Blizzard removed them in Cataclysm.