This is what's wrong with modern WoW

[GreenJesus]

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

You will be able to dungeon spam on an alt. Jesus christ. You can't even just quest through the story once? There's finally new questing content and you just want to skip it all? Go back to Classic.

[BreathTaker]

Utter nonsense. They DO know better how to play, and NO you can't have free BiS gear for free.

[Donald Hellscream]

Very cowardly to spring that on people only a few hours before launch.

Except it was clearly written in their dungeon blogpost several days prior to the launch, should they have considered that people don't read shit on the official wow page? Probably but that doesn't mean the information wasn't there.

- - - Updated - - -

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

It saved the people wanting to level through dungeon spam, the hassle of having to complete all the zones after dinging, since completing the story for each zone is prequisite for joining a covenant on your first character.

[Zalatoby]

They have. Same post says: "On subsequent characters, all dungeons can be made immediately available to you via the Threads of Fate system."

I have only just started playing this expansion, so I had not noticed that.

Thank you for the clarification.

[Lastgope]

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

Blizzard wants you to play through its story ONCE.

I agree with other, you have a very Karen mindset.

[RadmaKanow]

Dungeons locked until zone progress made whine.

So, essentially, Frodo and the rest of the group should be able to spam Mount Doom the moment Gandalf gave them the story mission to destroy The Ring? Before they actually went there, right?

[Super Kami Dende]

This is actually a better thing. It makes far more sense lorewise. Brings the RPG aspect to it.

[HitRefresh]

Not sure about your point - in prior expansions, I could queue for the entry level dungeons right off. I did, several times, because friends would want to check out the expansion but the starting zones would be crowded so we'd do a dungeon or two.

It's in reference to when you would have to physically travel to dungeons in WoW, which is generally when people considered WoW to be at its peak.

[xlord]

I want to pick a class and a weapon for that class and shoot other players, but blizzard forces me to play otherwise!

All jokes aside, I actually think this change makes a lot of sense and as said before in this topic they should've started with this when they introduced LFG.

[haiyken]

I am playing the game for dungeons and raids. Leveling is a sideshow.

My main issue with the story is there’s no sense of exploration at all, you just do the next thing in line. It’s better when I have more freedom, I find the lack of choice to be enervating.

But I just hit 60 and finished, so now I’ve got 8 dungeons to choose from, Torghast, I can do normal or heroic, world quests, whatever. It’s great! I just wish the leveling process felt more like that than like a checklist of quests you have to do.

I never understand players complaining about the lack of choice, exploration, etc. What are you expecting from a video game ? It's not real life, it's a construct. As a construct, it's made by design. You can only have so much freedom in a world that was designed to be interacted with in some way. Blizzard chose to design Shadowlands this way, at least for a first playthrough.

Did you prefer to have the game making you choose random zones with no idea why you're going there ? Then just run around trying to find quests in order to level ? Or just randomly kill mobs to get xp with story connected to it ? How is this more compelling than what we have now ? Most people would get bored and drop out of a game like this. You're not being fair talking about a "checklist of quests" because this is not what's in the game. Quests always worked this way, since classic. You have your questline, you go places, kill mobs, talk to npc, collect items, and repeat. This is not a surprise. If anything, quests are better than ever before because of the clear distinction between Campaigns and Quests, alowing you to know what's the main story and what you can avoid if you want to. These side-quests are exactly what brings more exploration, allow you to diverge from the main path if you want to. There are rare mobs everywhere, events during leveling, you can gather herbs and ores, etc.

Maybe you'd prefer to level with only dungeons, but if you're not interested in the zones and the story, why not make it a succession of gray rooms with mobs to kill, endlessly. Mobs ? Maybe just spheres and cubes. Of course this sounds ridiculous. It's like you want to play another game and are upset this is not it... I just don't get it. Or maybe, on the opposite, you'd want the story to be told exclusively in the dungeons and raids. Then we can only have a big hub with a bunch of instance portals and idle all together close to the mailbox...

[Azato]

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

You used to have to walk to the dungeon, for that you needed to have found the physical dungeon entrance. Classic wow had essentially the same system but slighty more tedious. Not sure what OP wants to say with this post.

[Malania]

Whats the problem with this exactly? Honestly I prefer to do the dungeon at the end of the zone when I've unlocked any quests to be done inside of it. Free gear and XP for something I was going to do anyway.

[shimargh]

I guess you don't remember, or wasn't there, when we needed to discover the dungeon before entering; oh, and walk there every time to do it.

[Nnyco]

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

Whats wrong with wow are whiny people like you.

[Krekal]

From a post on the official forums:

No. Quit telling us how we can play. Look, I quest up. But if someone wants to spam dungeons, that should be their choice. Modern Blizzard keeps trying to control how players play and it's not only unneeded, it's insulting and off-putting.

old wow had attunement

[Gurkan]

Remember how people loved attunement, and how TBC was so great because of it until they experienced very minor attunements in Legion?

[Shakzor]

Remember how people loved attunement, and how TBC was so great because of it until they experienced very minor attunements in Legion?

We don't do that here.
If it was in the past = the best thing ever. If it is done in the current xpac = the worst thing ever and game is dead, simply logic /s

[Thage]

While I respect OP's opinion, I disagree that it's what's wrong with modern WoW as though it were some perfect microcosm of the game's issues. There's nothing wrong with wanting and requiring players to experience the story campaign on their first trip through in an RPG. The system is designed such that once you do so once, you can level alts in Adventure Mode and dugneon grind to your heart's content if you so please.

It's not even all that big an ask. Leveling in Shadowlands is one of the faster level grinds for an expansion launch, up there with Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor.

[dcc626]

whats wrong with modern wow? the playerbase. a playerbase stuck in 2008.

[Scrod]

I never understand players complaining about the lack of choice, exploration, etc. What are you expecting from a video game ? It's not real life, it's a construct. As a construct, it's made by design. You can only have so much freedom in a world that was designed to be interacted with in some way. Blizzard chose to design Shadowlands this way, at least for a first playthrough.

Did you prefer to have the game making you choose random zones with no idea why you're going there ? Then just run around trying to find quests in order to level ? Or just randomly kill mobs to get xp with story connected to it ? How is this more compelling than what we have now ? Most people would get bored and drop out of a game like this. You're not being fair talking about a "checklist of quests" because this is not what's in the game. Quests always worked this way, since classic. You have your questline, you go places, kill mobs, talk to npc, collect items, and repeat. This is not a surprise. If anything, quests are better than ever before because of the clear distinction between Campaigns and Quests, alowing you to know what's the main story and what you can avoid if you want to. These side-quests are exactly what brings more exploration, allow you to diverge from the main path if you want to. There are rare mobs everywhere, events during leveling, you can gather herbs and ores, etc.

Maybe you'd prefer to level with only dungeons, but if you're not interested in the zones and the story, why not make it a succession of gray rooms with mobs to kill, endlessly. Mobs ? Maybe just spheres and cubes. Of course this sounds ridiculous. It's like you want to play another game and are upset this is not it... I just don't get it. Or maybe, on the opposite, you'd want the story to be told exclusively in the dungeons and raids. Then we can only have a big hub with a bunch of instance portals and idle all together close to the mailbox...

I will try to take your points one at a time. The main one: "Quests always worked this way, since classic". That's just completely, utterly untrue. Yes, on occasion we had questlines that we had to do to progress, like attunements, but the vast majority of questing in Vanilla was "here's a huge world, go explore". To "you can only have so much freedom" - duh. But in this expansion we have less than ever before. That's what I don't like.

Finally, you seem to think that me saying that I think the lore is pretty silly equates to me saying that we should have a big hub of instance portals that lead to gray rooms where we kill spheres and cubes. You can't think that this is a real argument, can you? Obviously, it's better to be fighting in a big spooky hallway full of interesting mobs with fun, diverse abilities than it is to fight gray mobs and cubes, and I don't need to know the life story of the mobs to do that. That's the core aspect of gameplay.

When I'm interested in good stories, I read books where the stories are actually good. Wow's story is terrible because it's really designed to be subservient to gameplay.

But overall, I'm not opposed to having a few big storyline quests, my main issue is that when you make the entire leveling experience built so that you should basically only do those big storyline quests, it feels pretty bland. I've said in the past that I actually like SWTOR's leveling model - you had a main storyline that you had to complete to finish a zone, but much of your leveling was side quests that were left up to you. This to me struck a good balance between exploration and telling a story. I actually knew what was going on because I didn't have to read hundreds of quests to keep up, just a few.