Dragonflight Alpha/Beta General Discussion

[Wangming]

You realize it's a bad sign when people don't discuss your game online, right?

They do. Literally in the game. And reddit, and discord and so on. I'm not saying Google trends isn't and indicator mind you. But you shouldn't take it as the gospel. There might not be a correlation as direct as you think.

Also trending on google isn't necessarily a good sign. Just think of Blizzard and last year.

[Hitei]

I don't think so, games like Animal Crossing are successful for a reason.

This is a dumb comparison. You might as well pretend the Sims being popular is somehow a marker of the attractiveness of housing in an MMO. Animal Crossing is a completely different genre of game, with completely different gameplay, played by a very dissimilar audience.

You know what makes Animal Crossing look like a complete joke? The success of gacha games. That doesn't mean adding mission table followers with cute splash art you can roll for in loot crates is an attractive feature that's sure to bring in tons of players.

[Nyel]

But why would those unlocks be needed?

Just have the micro classes be available at the character select screen.

That people have something to work for, easy as that. I would lock them behind a questline that can be started once you reach max level with your previous toon. So that it's not something people can start at day 1 of the expansion.

Unlocking something is a goal players can work towards. Oh and I am not talking about something as badly done as unlocking flying or something gated behind reputation. Make it a good, long and challenging questline that doesn't rely on weekly grinds. I'd say a micro class is worth the hassle.

I mean you don't need those restrictions I made up with armor classes. But those micro classes - if they're a thing - shouldn't be available just by purchasing the new expansion. They should be a reward for playing the expansion.

[Nymrohd]

They would also get tons of money from whales if they added P2W featureas into it, that doesnt mean it's a good idea.

Except the cost to the game's structure by adding P2W features would be significant (it already is tbh; imo one of the main reasons for the decline of guilds and social activity in WoW is how cheap boosting services can get and they have barely made the effort to stop those).
Meanwhile housing that costs a lot of gold doesn't FORCE anyone to buy gold, if anything it would stimulate the economy significantly. People will want to raise the gold to buy the house they want by gathering mats and building furnishings to sell in the AH. Really it would make the market so much wider that it would probably make it hard for goblins to keep track of everything (just imagine how much longer scans would take when you have a sudden influx of several hundreds of new tradeables that would be fairly active). Yet for some people the obvious answer will be to just buy tokens and buy a pre-furnished house.

[Civciv]

The only borrowed power should come from set bonuses and trinkets. Period.

for once i agree with you

[Wangming]

This is a dumb comparison. You might as well pretend the Sims being popular is somehow a marker of the attractiveness of housing in an MMO. Animal Crossing is a completely different genre of game, with completely different gameplay, played by a very dissimilar audience.

You know what makes Animal Crossing look like a complete joke? The success of gacha games. That doesn't mean adding mission table followers with cute splash art you can roll for in loot crates is an attractive feature that's sure to bring in tons of players.

Wanna talk about gatcha games? Genshin Impact is free to play, has a highly customizable housing system, action combat, a cooking and fishing system where you have to actually pay attention to what you are doing, and geuninely addictive open world content. And it is making an obnoxious ammount of money. Oh and it is multi platform.

WoW lacks all of these. And in the spirit of fairness FFXIV misses quite a few as well.

[sandini]

You do realise this is probably the biggest argument against player housing right?

I would have loved the garrison as a subzone to a capital. (like a wing in Karabor or Bladespire).
Having the farm, mission table, the mine and 2 or 3 customizable buildings for yourself, but using the rest of the capital together with everyone else.

[Dragons Are Bad Mkay]

They do. Literally in the game. And reddit, and discord and so on. I'm not saying Google trends isn't and indicator mind you. But you shouldn't take it as the gospel. There might not be a correlation as direct as you think.

Also trending on google isn't necessarily a good sign. Just think of Blizzard and last year.

No offense, but that's pure cope since WoW has more hits on google trends than it did when the controversy was at its height (when XIV was above WoW there).

[Wangming]

I would have loved the garrison as a subzone to a capital. (like a wing in Karabor or Bladespire).
Having the farm, mission table, the mine and 2 or 3 customizable buildings for yourself, but using the rest of the capital together with everyone else.

I would have loved for Karabor to be the capital.

I hgnestly feel that Garrisons weren't the problem with WoD. The general lack of everything else was the problem.

- - - Updated - - -

No offense, but that's pure cope since WoW has more hits on google trends than it did when the controversy was at its height (when XIV was above WoW there).

Well fucking duh, we are two weeks from the expansion reveal and the title got leaked. Of course there are going to be tons of hits. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you religiously believe in google trends metrics corellating with sub numbers or not. I don't play FFXIV because I think it is more popular than WoW. I play it cause I enjoy it more than WoW.

[Shinrael]

You are the perfect example of someone who didnt learn obviously. You are actually an example of why the game needs more incentive for group content and much less for solo content

I disagree. But those people should be incentivized to find a guild then.

That is literally the point of an mmo.

Otherwise just play modded skyrim or candy crush or whatever mindless equevelant there is of the current solo content.

You are a perfect example of why extroverts should try getting some alone time. Maybe that will teach them to stop enforcing things they consider "right" onto others.
In the meanwhile, if an introvert wants to spend time in quiet, then power to them.

Now, about Trade Chat in particular, if people really are bothered by it, they can just disable it. You guys are looking for problems where there aren't any. Player Houses could have /2 enabled if it is so important. But it isn't. It isn't enabled in the open world where you are supposed to (if the game was actually designed properly) spend majority of your time. So by design, players are not supposed to be constantly within range of Trade Chat's harassment and advertisments. The sky will not fall. Trade Chat is a trivial matter when discussing Player Housing. If you want Trade Chat, go to your capital city. Those of us who don't care will enjoy Player Housing in peace.

If having their own house will bring more players into the game (and it will), then indirectly that will increase the number of players you encounter in capital cities too, even if they spend majority of their time in solitude at "home".

[Nymrohd]

I would have loved for Karabor to be the capital.

I hgnestly feel that Garrisons weren't the problem with WoD. The general lack of everything else was the problem.

I actually refunded my WoD prepurchase when they backtracked on Karabor. Only bought the game well some months after launch (and quit again after 2-3 months when I had all the achievements I wanted).

I know we are all expecting Lordaeron but honestly I think a revamped Azuremyst has every chance of being the best looking place in WoW.

[Raetary]

You do realise this is probably the biggest argument against player housing right?

It's not.
The biggest argument is the time and resources required to implement it.

Player housing does not keep you locked up in your instanced space.
It does not do so in any game that has the feature, and it fundamentally can't do that as the whole point is to play and interact with others so you can get furniture and decoration to put in there.

[Dragons Are Bad Mkay]

I would have loved for Karabor to be the capital.

I hgnestly feel that Garrisons weren't the problem with WoD. The general lack of everything else was the problem.

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Well fucking duh, we are two weeks from the expansion reveal and the title got leaked. Of course there are going to be tons of hits. But at the end of the day it doesn't matter if you religiously believe in google trends metrics corellating with sub numbers or not. I don't play FFXIV because I think it is more popular than WoW. I play it cause I enjoy it more than WoW.

A WoW speculation thread is a weird place to prolythesize your anime game, but the rest of your fanbase has done weirder things so you do you boo.

[Revamp Man]

Let’s assume we are going the way of uniting Azeroth in 10.0

With the cross faction gameplay coming it would suggest that we could possibly be seeing the same with the dragonflights so there is the matter of figuring out what stands in the way there

1. The bronze missing their aspect and the looming creation of the infinite
2. The blue being reunited with the lost part of their flight that resides on the broken isles and includes dragons able to breed
3. The green dealing with the loss of Ysera and her daughter taking over
4. The red and what we last saw as Alex trying to reason with what turned into the void flight
5. The black and Wrathion’s little search for the dragon isles along with more black dragons appearing in island expeditions
6. The twilight flight and where they sit now in terms of being possible allies or enemies to the overall forces of Azeroth

Wrathion is still kinda shunned by the other dragons based on BfA and we currently only have 1 true aspect so in terms of story conflict it would make sense for past enemies to return and I see 3.

1. Scarlet crusade which can easily be led by a black dragon because they like meddling in human affairs and giving themselves power.
2. Chromatus who is just sealed could easily be broken out by remnants of the twilight cult or even the infinite and since it took multiple aspects to beat him it places him at the best point to be reintroduced as a threat.
3. Galakrond who is the first enemy of the aspects and who merely lost due to his size being his biggest weakness and the map datamined all those years ago without his bones in it could support he is brought back and he would become the biggest threat due to his ability to spread undeath.

Each of these could be end bosses of raids and they all have support via different forces.

Scarlet crusade has support via black dragons and any who hate the current alliance rule

Chromatus has the twilight cult which still survives

Galakrond essentially makes his own army but I can see the infinite lending a hand

[Hitei]

Wanna talk about gatcha games? Genshin Impact is free to play, has a highly customizable housing system, action combat, a cooking and fishing system where you have to actually pay attention to what you are doing, and geuninely addictive open world content. And it is making an obnoxious ammount of money. Oh and it is multi platform.

WoW lacks all of these. And in the spirit of fairness FFXIV misses quite a few as well.

No one* plays Genshin because of the teapot, which is widely considered kinda shitty. Or because of it's non-minigame cooking system whose "gameplay" is just a hurdle to being able to auto-cook, or for the fishing system that is utterly and completely pointless outside of The Catch. Wow fishing is genuinely more interesting and rewarding despite just being clicking on a bobber, just by virtue of its varied and usable rewards, and not being tied to stupid low-count pools on a cooldown.

This is the whole problem. You guys conflate a game doing well with all the systems in that game being a good idea that should be added, when in reality you listed off several badly implemented systems in genshin to leave the actual good part (it's open world) as an afterthought.

People don't play FFXIV for the housing*. You know how I know? Casual observation:

When people are organically talking about the game, they go:

"FFXIV is great, the story is awesome!"
"FFXIV has really amazing music!"
"FFXIV has such a nice community!"

They don't go "Oh yeah, I play FFXIV because it's housing is so great". The only time I've ever even seen it get brought up on these forums is when there's already a discussion specifically about housing and its used as an example of a current MMO with a functional housing system.

Just like absolutely no one* is playing Genshin for Serenitea, despite it being a fairly robust system that gets additions frequently.

The fact that a system functions in another game that is doing well does not evidence it being a good or worthwhile system to add. Especially when the nature of that system means hijacking a non-negligible amount of dev time from the art and systems teams for the foreseeable future. Time that could go into systems from those games that actually do have real value, like Genshin's open world content.

People don't play Wow for housing, and no significant portion of the playerbase is leaving because of the lack of housing. Which makes it not some winning idea "to get people back", but rather a secondary bullet point that might get people who are already content with the game and would likely try 10.0 anyway slightly more excited to do so.

--

*Yes, this is hyperbole and there are atypical people who are exceptions.

[Revamp Man]

And because “we are much more powerful than the threats you mentioned” will be a point I think it’s important to note that we aren’t

Storywise we lost the artifacts, we used up the heart’s power, we will lose our attachments to the covenants outside of the shadowlands.

We are no stronger than we were at the beginning of legion

[Nymrohd]

One thing I do hope is that Blizzard gets better with having us fight massive creatures. Deathwing was a disaster and N'zoth was a cop-out. Galakrond and Chromatus should both be bigger than Deathwing. Find a way to let us fight massive creatures. Maybe something enlarges us, maybe we fight them on dragonback.

[Wangming]

A WoW speculation thread is a weird place to prolythesize your anime game, but the rest of your fanbase has done weirder things so you do you boo.

I know you want to appear superior so that you can look down on me, but before you attempt to use big words, please double check their spelling. Also it is quite telling that yuu just started pulling out personal attack because you couldn't refute my argument. WoW may have more sub numbers now. I don't know, because Blizzard doesn't publish those since WoD and Square Enix never did. For all we know, WoW can have twice as many. Or it can have half as much. We simply can't tell. We can look at metrics like google trends and twitch views, but those are only hints to the truth. Let's leave parading graphs from third party sights as the truth to Bellular and the like.

[crusadernero]

No one* plays Genshin because of the teapot, which is widely considered kinda shitty. Or because of it's non-minigame cooking system whose "gameplay" is just a hurdle to being able to auto-cook, or for the fishing system that is utterly and completely pointless outside of The Catch. Wow fishing is genuinely more interesting and rewarding despite just being clicking on a bobber, just by virtue of its varied and usable rewards, and not being tied to stupid low-count pools on a cooldown.

This is the whole problem. You guys conflate a game doing well with all the systems in that game being a good idea that should be added, when in reality you listed off several badly implemented systems in genshin to leave the actual good part (it's open world) as an afterthought.

People don't play FFXIV for the housing*. You know how I know? Casual observation:

When people are organically talking about the game, they go:

"FFXIV is great, the story is awesome!"
"FFXIV has really amazing music!"
"FFXIV has such a nice community!"

They don't go "Oh yeah, I play FFXIV because it's housing is so great". The only time I've ever even seen it get brought up on these forums is when there's already a discussion specifically about housing and its used as an example of a current MMO with a functional housing system.

Just like absolutely no one* is playing Genshin for Serenitea, despite it being a fairly robust system that gets additions frequently.

The fact that a system functions in another game that is doing well does not evidence it being a good or worthwhile system to add. Especially when the nature of that system means hijacking a non-negligible amount of dev time from the art and systems teams for the foreseeable future. Time that could go into systems from those games that actually do have real value, like Genshin's open world content.

People don't play Wow for housing, and no significant portion of the playerbase is leaving because of the lack of housing. Which makes it not some winning idea "to get people back", but rather a secondary bullet point that might get people who are already content with the game and would likely try 10.0 anyway slightly more excited to do so.

--

*Yes, this is hyperbole and there are atypical people who are exceptions.

I have played ESO casually over the years and I have never done anything with the housing feature within the game. I think at best theres maybe a chair inside a room somewhere, cant really remember since its been years since I checked it out.

Its probably a nice feature to just have in a MMORPG, as it is everlasting and can just be buildt upon as the years go by. But to go from that to have it as a main thing within the game? I dont think so.

Its not really a vocal point in ESO either. Its there and I can dabble with it if I want, but I can easily ignore it. The game itself is good enough.

[Dragons Are Bad Mkay]

I know you want to appear superior so that you can look down on me, but before you attempt to use big words, please double check their spelling. Also it is quite telling that yuu just started pulling out personal attack because you couldn't refute my argument. WoW may have more sub numbers now. I don't know, because Blizzard doesn't publish those since WoD and Square Enix never did. For all we know, WoW can have twice as many. Or it can have half as much. We simply can't tell. We can look at metrics like google trends and twitch views, but those are only hints to the truth. Let's leave parading graphs from third party sights as the truth to Bellular and the like.

Dude, hop onto XIV and go relax for a bit, you're clearly upset about something. This isn't healthy.